Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Greek comedy The Summer with Carmen is another film about filmmaking \u2014 this time, about making them strictly in your head. It is about screenwriting, to be precise \u2014 and about the friendship between two men. The main location is a gay beach where, while observing the deadpan comedy that goes on among the sunseekers, Demos (Yorgos Tsiantoulas) and Nikitas (Andreas Labropoulos) muse on the latter\u2019s plans for a movie. The idea they hothouse is based on the events of a previous summer, evoked in stylised flashbacks.Divided into acts, each titled accordingly (Set-Up, Confrontation, etc), with captions flashing up key terms of screenwriting lore (eg The Hero\u2019s Goal), this is a very in-jokey film, an extended and somewhat forced wink at viewers who have pored over screenwriting manuals by the likes of Robert McKee and flung them away in exasperation. It is a movie about nothing, almost Seinfeldian in its cultivation of knowing inconsequentiality.It is also boisterously sexual in its full-on depictions of Demos\u2019s love life. Spending much of the film naked, the heavily bearded Tsiantoulas, who seems freshly hewn from a slab of the Peloponnese, resembles a Tom of Finland version of Popeye\u2019s muscleman foe Bluto. His sensitive and lugubrious Demos makes a nice comic pairing with Labropoulos\u2019s scrawny, camp live-wire Nikitas. Carmen, meanwhile, is a small, anxious-looking dog previously belonging to Demos\u2019s ex-boyfriend Panos; but the reference is also to Bizet\u2019s Carmen, featured here in a drag interlude. \u00a0Written by director Zacharias Mavroeidis and Xenofon Chalatsis, The Summer with Carmen plays like a comedy version of Alain Guiraudie\u2019s 2013 cruising drama Stranger by the Lake, with a dash of early, scrappier Almod\u00f3var. The film is likeable, daring and ebulliently queer but, for all the obsession with plot structure, a shapeless ramble. Still, it sticks defiantly to its credo of \u201cthe more meta, the better\u201d.\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606In UK cinemas from February 28<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Greek comedy The Summer with Carmen is another film about filmmaking \u2014 this time, about making them strictly in your head. It is about screenwriting, to be<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":223880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-223879","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223879"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223881,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223879\/revisions\/223881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}