The Summer with Carmen, written and directed by Zacharias Mavroeidis, is a meta-narrative, gay comedy that plays with our expectations of cinema.

★★★★☆

Set in Greece, the plot follows friends Demosthenes and Nikitas, as they lounge around a cruising beach in Athens trying to write a screenplay. They begin to write about the summer that Demosthenes broke up with his ex, Panos. Demos’ defiant stance on the break up reveals his uncertainty and regret, and he offers to take care of Panos’ dog, Carmen, as an excuse to see him again. 

As Demos and Nikitas workshop the story, the film jumps back and forth between reality and fiction. The internal narrative changes as they add in new vignettes to illustrate parables for modern-day life, including: ‘reality is not always realistic’, ‘we are all sad little sissies’, ‘self-knowledge is a convenient self-deception’, and ‘bisexuals are real’.

The film is a tour de force that packs a lot into its lean run-time. It could easily get out of hand, losing its train of thought in the labyrinthine construction, but Mavroeidis masterfully weaves its many threads together, guiding us to the heart of the story.

The film is ostensibly concerned with the issue of representation and its tenuous link to self-identity. Our sense of self, this ‘enlightened’ self-knowledge, is never something that is clear cut and certain. Just like the film-within-a-film, the reality of identity is a complex fabrication of events that are remembered and misremembered in a flurrying array of dramatics.

Like Prometheus and Zeus looking down at their creation of man from Olympos, the protagonists peer back at their constructed selves from the rocky shores. They watch these ‘selves’ as in a movie, and run the risk of being deceived by this idea of certainty. Cinema is a way of accessing the self, but at its worst, threatens to define it and lock it into place—as the gods once immortalised their heroes into constellations. 

Its mise-en-abyme, however, stops the film from falling into this trap, creating nooks and crannies to experiment with issues of identity. Demos and Nikitas try desperately to construct their film within the paradigm of the hero’s journey, only to come up short. Demosthenes looks the part of the typical Greek hero, only in this myth, the Hydra has been replaced with an ex who can’t stop coming back into the picture and Cerberus has turned into a chihuahua.

The film shows that the hero’s journey, a transition from state A to B, is far too linear and convenient. It suggests a restrictive view on success and selfhood, often conditioned by heteronormative ideals, in a reality where people aren’t so easily categorised or translatable. Queer folk aren’t empowered by this kind of narrative model; indeed, heteronormativity restricts it. It’s a format that has continued into classical cinema, something that queer people are often ostracised from. This is made clear when Nikitas recounts losing out on an acting job because he was ‘too gay’, highlighting the narrow-minded view that straightness is a prerequisite for heroism and the standard for conventional storytelling.

The hero’s journey presumes we have a fixed relationship with fate. But the film asks: What if we overcome the struggle, change as a result, and then, once the camera has turned off, go right back to making the same old mistakes? It again raises one of the film’s key messages: self-knowledge is a convenient self-deception. By upending this teleological and heteronormative logic, The Summer with Carmen expertly crafts what Jack Halberstam has referred to as a ‘queer art of failure’. Just as Nikitas fails to land the part in a movie, so too, does this film fail to reach the high-brow reverence of the Greek myths or even give us clearly outlined characters. Bathos is the quintessential motif of the film, as these archetypal figures come up against the campy, quotidian dramatics of gay life. It’s done with a great sense of fun, however, as in one scene when the two friends play around with the idea of turning the movie into a musical: their fellow cruisers on the beach act as a Greek chorus supporting a drag queen as she lip syncs the iconic ‘Habanera’ from Bizet’s Carmen on a pink lido. 

The Verdict

By failing to ever settle on a genre or a single narrative focus, the film becomes a chimeric force of queer rebellion. The Summer with Carmen is everything a gay film should be: funny, irreverent and camp, with an earnest (if not slightly over-the-top) emotional climax. It’s hot and sexy but also incredibly clever in the way it plays with cinematic form. It’s a wonderfully crafted metaphor for the illusions normative culture tells about itself and even a warning to queer culture not to take itself too seriously, to become too organised—lest it ossify and turn to stone! 

Words by Kit Gullis

The Summer with Carmen is n UK cinemas from 28 February