A Summer with Carmen Review (2023) ( Red Band Review )

Disclaimer: This is a red band review. The movie is intended for an adult audience. Parental guidance needed.

A Summer with Carmen (2023):

Directed and co-written by Zacharias Mavroeidis

Not every summer cinema needs to be spectacular. Sometimes, all it takes is a beach, two friends, a complicated romantic history, and a dog named Carmen to reveal the contradictions of contemporary life. With A Summer with Carmen (2023), Greek filmmaker Zacharias Mavroeidis offers a queer comedy-drama that finds its cinematic language in the seemingly inconsequential moments of friendship, desire, disappointment, and self-invention.

Today, Les Épicuriens Culture turns its attention to a film that takes us beyond the familiar landscapes of American, French, British, or Spanish cinema, inviting us instead into the sun-drenched, occasionally uncomfortable, and unexpectedly tender world of contemporary Athens.

The premise is deceptively simple. Demosthenes and Nikitas, two friends played by Yorgos Tsiantoulas and Andreas Labropoulos, spend a summer day at a queer-friendly nudist beach, attempting to develop a screenplay inspired by real events. Yet what begins as a playful exercise in storytelling gradually becomes something more revealing: an examination of the distance between lived experience and its cinematic reconstruction. As the friends turn their memories into potential scenes, the film playfully interrogates the relationship between autobiography, desire, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives.

Mavroeidis understands that the most revealing drama often emerges when characters believe they are simply having fun. The conversations between Demosthenes and Nikitas are among the film's greatest pleasures. Reclining beneath the Greek sun, exchanging outrageous ideas and making one another laugh, the two men inhabit a world in which intimacy is expressed through teasing, irreverence, and shared complicity. Their chemistry feels remarkably unforced. Tsiantoulas and Labropoulos possess the kind of screen presence that makes friendship appear less like something performed than something discovered in the rhythms of conversation itself.

There is a distinctly cinematic pleasure in these beach sequences. The nudity is neither merely provocative nor gratuitously decorative; it belongs to the film's broader exploration of the body as a site of freedom, exposure, and social negotiation. Here, the beach becomes a temporary refuge from the conventions that govern everyday life, a space in which identities can be explored with a greater degree of openness. Yet freedom is never entirely uncomplicated. Beneath the relaxed atmosphere and comic exchanges lies an awareness of vulnerability: the difficulty of sustaining relationships, the uncertainty of desire, and the uneasy transition from youthful spontaneity to adult responsibility.

This tension between lightness and emotional upheaval gives the film much of its appeal. Demosthenes is confronted with circumstances that cannot be resolved through humour alone. His father's serious illness brings the possibility of death into a summer otherwise occupied by creative ambitions and personal entanglements. At the same time, his relationship with Panos, played by Nikolaos Mihas, comes to an end. Their separation introduces a different kind of loss, less absolute than death but no less capable of destabilising an individual's sense of belonging.

When Panos asks Demosthenes to take care of Carmen, the dog they once shared, the gesture acquires an emotional significance that extends beyond the practical arrangements of a breakup. Carmen becomes a living reminder of a relationship that has ended but whose traces remain. She embodies continuity amid disruption, affection without the need for explanation, and the possibility that tenderness might survive even when romantic attachment does not.

One of the film's most touching moments comes when Demosthenes returns home after a day of hope, disappointment, and emotional exhaustion, only to be greeted by Carmen's wagging tail. The scene derives its power from its simplicity. Where human relationships are complicated by expectations, misunderstandings, and the burden of memory, the dog's affection offers a moment of unambiguous consolation. Carmen does not solve Demosthenes' problems; she simply makes them more bearable. In a film attentive to the small gestures through which people sustain one another, this modest encounter feels entirely earned.

The domestic world provides a counterpoint to the relative freedom of the beach. Demosthenes' mother, Kaiti, played by Roubini Vasilakopoulou, emerges as a strong and resilient presence as her husband returns home seriously ill and bedridden. The family's circumstances introduce a sober dimension to the narrative, reminding us that the freedom celebrated elsewhere in the film exists alongside obligations that cannot simply be abandoned. Summer, traditionally associated with escape and renewal, becomes a season in which the characters must confront the persistence of grief, responsibility, and change.

What distinguishes A Summer with Carmen is its willingness to accommodate these emotional registers without forcing them into an artificial harmony. Comedy and tragedy coexist, sometimes uneasily, as they do in life. The film's humour does not erase suffering; rather, it becomes one of the means by which suffering can be approached without surrendering to it. Its queer perspective is similarly refreshing. Instead of reducing queer identity to a single political statement or a conventional coming-of-age narrative, Mavroeidis allows his characters to be contradictory, occasionally ridiculous, affectionate, self-absorbed, and profoundly human.

The screenplay's playful structure is particularly effective in this regard. As Demosthenes and Nikitas discuss the film they might make, the distinction between the lives they have lived and the stories they wish to tell begins to blur. Their creative collaboration becomes a subtle reflection on authorship itself: who has the right to tell a story, how personal experience is transformed into fiction, and what happens when the messy reality of human relationships resists the neat resolutions demanded by narrative convention.

This self-reflexive quality gives the film an additional layer of interest for cinephiles. Cinema here is not simply a window onto experience but a process of selection, interpretation, and reinvention. The characters are both participants in their own dramas and potential authors of them, attempting to transform confusion into something intelligible. The resulting comedy is affectionate rather than cynical, finding its richest material in the absurdity of trying to impose narrative order on lives that refuse to cooperate.

At Les Épicuriens Culture, we watched the film in Greek with English subtitles, and we were thoroughly charmed. Although A Summer with Carmen is not a recent release, it remains a fascinating discovery: an independent production whose modest scale is more than compensated for by the vitality of its screenplay, the warmth of its performances, and its sensitivity to the fragile architecture of friendship. Tsiantoulas and Labropoulos are particularly engaging together, while Carmen herself proves to be an irresistible addition to the ensemble. It is difficult not to smile whenever she appears.

The film does contain nudity, sexual situations, and discussions of serious illness and romantic separation. Its humour can be decidedly raunchy, but its irreverence rarely comes at the expense of its characters' dignity. Instead, the frankness of its approach contributes to a world that feels lived-in rather than sanitised, one in which bodies, relationships, and emotions are allowed to exist without excessive embarrassment.

For viewers accustomed to the polished conventions of big-budget productions, the film's independent character may require a slight adjustment in expectations. Yet its pleasures are precisely those that cannot be measured in production value alone: the authenticity of its dialogue, the ease of its performances, the intelligence of its writing, and its capacity to discover emotional significance in apparently ordinary encounters.

Where, ultimately, does freedom reside? In the openness of a nudist beach, in the intimacy of a friendship, in the act of transforming one's experiences into art, or in the simple companionship of a dog waiting at home? A Summer with Carmen suggests that freedom is rarely a permanent condition. It is something negotiated, lost, recovered, and occasionally glimpsed in the smallest gestures of everyday life.

The summer will bring surprises, heartbreak, illness, and unexpected forms of companionship. Yet Mavroeidis leaves room for the possibility that even when life refuses to follow the screenplay we have imagined for it, there remains something worth celebrating in the attempt.

Our verdict: 5/5 stars.

A Summer with Carmen is a warm, irreverent, and perceptive queer comedy-drama that finds beauty in imperfection and emotional depth in the everyday. For anyone willing to embrace Greek-language cinema with English subtitles, it is a delightful discovery.

A final recommendation from Les Épicuriens Culture: seek it out on legitimate streaming services or through LGBTQ+ film festivals and independent cinema programmes. Its modest pleasures deserve to find an audience beyond the summer in which they unfold.