The Summer with Carmen tells the story of two friends, Demosthenes and Nikitas, as they try to write a film. Set two summers prior, when Demos takes care of his ex’s dog, Carmen, the film weaves its way around a labyrinth of layered narratives. What ensues is a Mediterranean romp of love, friendship and the complexities of creative pursuit.
Director Zacharias Mavroidís speaks to The Indie about navigating this meta-narrative, the future of queer cinema and how casting affects a film.
This is such a unique film and has this wonderful meta storyline. How did the idea first come about, and what was the process of writing it? Was it anything like Demos and Nikitas in the film?
There were quite a few similarities actually. The very first draft of the film, which I wrote together with Xenofón Chalátsis, was hardly a film within a film; it was just two scenes, in the beginning and the end, where the two friends remember this story. Along the way, the actual process of writing created interesting conflicts. This became part of the script. So it was very organic; it wasn’t intentional at all. It ended up reflecting our process of writing.
Did it affect the way you produced it at all?
Trying to deal with this film-within-a-film became a challenge to the editing. The final cut is not really different from the script, but there are some crucial shifts of scenes and twisting plot points. It was quite difficult to blend these two storylines together in the editing. When reading the script, it was much easier to follow the two plots. It didn’t work the same when watching the film. I discovered in the editing that whilst watching the film, you were more likely to follow the feelings of these characters than the events. In order to aid this, we realized that the characters should have a continuity in their feelings: if you leave your character sad in the present time, when you go back in the past, you need to find him sad as well, even though there is no causality between them.
The movie moves from comedic to compassionate and dramatic. To make such big shifts, to take the audience with you and make them laugh at the characters one minute and feel sympathy for them another, is quite challenging. It was interesting to see how music affected this. It became a very important narrative element. There’s this scene where Demos needs to leave for work, and the dog, Carmen, is crying. At first, you’re laughing because it’s ridiculous, but then, somehow, it becomes incredibly emotional. The music that plays in the scene doesn’t change. It’s a super dramatic Baroque number, an original piece by Ted Regklis. It was a big surprise to see how this song in the first half of the scene is funny because it makes everything so melodramatic and then shifts to become heart-wrenching.
As you were filming, were there any moments where you had to switch up the narrative because it didn’t make sense from a production point of view?
I was really conscious of the production side even as I began writing the film. It was a very conscious choice on my part to make a low-budget film because it’s really hard to get funding (raise enough money to make a film) in Greece. The film doesn’t necessarily look low budget, but we were restricted to a certain number of spaces and actors, and we only shot it in 25 days. The production side of a film is not distinct from the artistic content—they go hand in hand. The budget is part of the artistic materials you have. Jacques Rivette said something akin to every film is like a document of its production process, of the production conditions under which it was created.
The inner story deals a lot with the question of intimacy. How do you see the framed narrative as affecting this exploration?
I have never tried to connect these two parts of the film because the inner film is really sentimental; it has to do with the emotional charge of the film. The outer one, with all these meta-narrative games, is quite intellectual. Without it, it would be a more specific film, a standard queer rom-com. I think the framed narration, the intellectual side, opens the film to different audiences. For some queer people, it’s really rejuvenating, to see a certain kind of depiction of gay life. For non-gay audiences, it might be shocking or even a documentary into queer culture or they may just appreciate the narrative games. Moreover, I think the meta-narrative adds a certain richness. It looks over the characters and plays jokes on them. In doing so, it sustains and even uplifts the notion of our identities being a performance.
I love how the film pokes fun at this question of identity and plays around with it, particularly queer identity. In a similar vein, how do you feel about the term ‘Queer Cinema’? Do you think it has become too fixed?
Queer cinema is a historical fact. The content of queer cinema is a reflection of the queer communities that made and watched it. The queer cinema of the 60’s or 70’s was progressive or revolutionary. Then, in the 90s, these films were trying to make our stories mainstream. It was focused on coming-out stories or painful stories of dead lovers. I don’t know where we are now, where we’re heading as a planet and as a global society, and where queer stories lie in that. But having traveled to different queer festivals with the film, what queer stood for changed. There were some older festivals that had a slightly outdated way of categorising the films: films with a blue sticker next to them were gay; pink was lesbian; yellow stickers were trans, and so on. Then there were festivals run by younger people which were really diverse, showing films that had nothing to do with queer sexuality, but sexuality in general.
I think that The Summer with Carmen could easily be a non-queer film in the sense that the queerness of the characters is not part of the plot. If Demos was straight, the story would still stand. It’s about two friends writing a story about a break-up. I think in the future, queer cinema will explore stories and themes that are not specific to our queerness like coming out or bullying or homophobia. Instead it will be about universal, everyday experiences through a queer eye.
Do you think that this more open approach to identity and categorisation will affect who can tell these stories?
There is a big debate over who tells what stories. I think there is a huge mistake within our current conception of identity politics. Someone might say I have no right to tell a story about a black trans woman. If you flip this argument upside down, it asks, for example, black trans women to take the microphone but asks them to speak only on their experience as black trans women. The problem is not the content of the stories, it is who holds the microphone. I believe we should look for a democratic share of the microphone. If your identity matches that of your characters, it is not a guarantee that it will make a good representation. We’ve seen awful representations of queer people from queer people.
It reminds me of a scene in the film when Nikitas laments not getting an acting role because he was ‘too gay’ to play a straight character. Do you have similar views when it comes to acting?
I don’t think that gay parts should necessarily be played by gay people and vice versa for straight parts. This is irrelevant to the content of the story. I think the question of who plays whom is really different for theater and for cinema because cinema is so closely tied to realism. You can suspend your disbelief a lot more in theatre. We still live in a world where if you see an effeminate guy, you assume that he is a homosexual. Narrative in cinema, more so than any other medium, is always based on assumptions. So you have to take this into consideration. If you want to have a straight male character in your film who is effeminate, you have to sustain that within the narrative to avoid this assumption. It’s not only in cinema, it’s in society as well that we are lacking straight men who are feminine and proud about it. On the contrary, we have so many gay men who are really macho. There’s so much gay machismo out there.
But casting, in general, is important. I collaborated with casting directors Akis Gourzoulidis and Sotiria Marini, with whom I had worked before. They did a wonderful job and were so crucial to the success of this film. To go back to assumptions, I didn’t want there to be any assumption that Demos and Nikitas were a couple. This is a matter of chemistry between the actors, and it was a big factor in the casting.
The Summer with Carmen is now screening nationwide and will be available on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital platforms from 31st March. Read our review here.
Words by Kit Gullis
Support The Indiependent
We’re trying to raise £200 a month to help cover our operational costs. This includes our ‘Writer of the Month’ awards, where we recognise the amazing work produced by our contributor team. If you’ve enjoyed reading our site, we’d really appreciate it if you could donate to The Indiependent. Whether you can give £1 or £10, you’d be making a huge difference to our small team.