4th Evia Film Project: Summer Lovers

The 4th Evia Film Project, the ecological initiative of the Thessaloniki Film Festival, which took place from 17 to 21 June, left us events, debates, masterclasses, and screenings with the leitmotif of the Greek summer. Evia Film Project has shown us how cinema has reflected it, in terms of thematics, characteristics of filming in the hottest months of the year, and also the evolution of the mores and the gaze. Both foreign and local directors have explored from the cliché of Greek holidays (sand, sex and sun) in Summer Lovers (Randal Kleiser, 1982) to the intimacy of a love narrated over several decades, in the closing of Richard Linklater‘s trilogy, Before Midnight (2013), through to a comedy that has stood the test of time admirably, Jenny, Jenny (Dinos Dimopoulos, 1966).

After the opening of the fourth edition with the screening of Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, 2008), the open-air cinema Apollon, in the seaside resort of Edipsos, a tourist destination that already seduced the Romans and where you can still pass in front of the summer house of the famous Papanicolaou, whose test has saved the lives of millions of women, continued to hang the sold out sign to demonstrate the growing rootedness of the event on the island that suffered the most terrible fires in August 2021.

The revitalisation of northern Evia, with the film and environmental event taking place in the villages of Edipsos, Agia Anna and Limni, bringing together filmmakers, producers, sustainability experts and film critics, who share five days of activities alongside the island’s inhabitants, is an initiative that in its fourth year has proved that culture has a preferential place and a leading role in Greek society.

The screening of Summer Lovers showed us a hidden gem in the filmography of the director of Grease (1978). Starring a very young Daryl Hannah, Peter Gallaher (Grace and Frankie), and the prematurely deceased French actress Valérie Quennessen, who left us at the age of 31 due to a car accident. Kleiser’s film transports us to a summer of love on the island of Santorini —although filming also took place on Mykonos, Delos and Crete— where the images that prologue the young American couple’s holiday in Greece show us a lost world of nudist backpackers, late hippies, still watched with some amazement by some of the island’s inhabitants, while others are cashing in on a new industry, which in a few decades will raise the per capita spending of the new, more demanding and more affluent tourists. The lust for authenticity led producers to hire local backpackers as extras, who were paid a free meal and 1,000 drachmas a day simply to be themselves, sending shockwaves through the island.

But this is still the early 1980s, when nudism is as spontaneous as it is ubiquitous, and it is still possible to spend a whole summer on the beach and have free love for less than what a plane ticket costs today. Cathy and Michael move into a typical villa in Oia, Santorini, with its terrace, barrel vault, and iconic views, now converted into a gift shop called ‘Summer Lovers’. The view from his house reveals, between the domes, a neighbour he is captivated by —and in whose house we could stay today, transformed into a luxury hotel, the Art Maisons-Oia. Lina, a slender French archaeologist, moves like a sylph up the stone stairs in the narrow lanes of Santorini, rides a crowded, dusty bus to the beach, and works on an excavation, but her presence is as ethereal as it is captivating to the young American. He watches and admires her seductively, unable to hide his attraction from Cathy. The Frenchwoman’s background is that of a wounded person, and Kleiser, who wrote the screenplay, reveals it in a way that makes Lina’s unusual maturity and presence understandable.

So attractive does she end up being, that Cathy’s initial jealousy turns to admiration and a deep relationship of affection and respect is born, so that the young archaeologist ends up moving in with them, taking them to meet her friends, sophisticated and free, sharing their days in an atmosphere of innocent and genuine love. Rather than seeming old-fashioned, Kleiser’s style is by no means kitsch, on the contrary it still evokes, forty years later, a lovely, lost world where a generation defied the mores, standing on the shoulders of their older siblings, the real fighters to expand the moral and social horizons of their ancestors. The leading trio play their roles with a freshness and beauty that is as believable as it is natural. However, despite showing a healthy female camaraderie, Summer Lovers reveals that their threesome is not such, but a two-way relationship on Michael’s part, with the acquiescence of the two women, who do not share their sexual affinity, limiting themselves to a deep friendship. Closer to the Mormon family than to an unusual family formation, Lina, Michael, and Carthy live their affair with the freedom to ignore established boundaries, with the blessing of their peers. In this sense, Randal Kleiser had modified his original script, which included a lesbian relationship, for fear of rejection by his producers, hoping that an implied sexual attraction would shine through in his film, which we can affirm did not happen.

Even so, after the bombshell The Blue Lagoon (1980), the director offers us an idyllic love story in paradise, which he wrote inspired by the climate of freedom he observed on a trip to the islands, and in which he included almost documentary images, with an excellent soundtrack, which features hits such as “Hard To Say I’m Sorry” by Chicago, “Just Can’t Get Enough” by Depeche Mode or “I’m so Excited” by the Pointer Sisters.

Moreover, in the local count, Evia Film Project included the screening of several Greek films, among them Girls in the Sun (Vassilis Georgiadis, 1968), Goldfish (Yorgos Angelopoulos, 2017) and the 1966 colour production Jenny Jenny, directed by Dinos Dimopoulos, one of the directors of the golden age of Greek cinema in the 1960s, whose films have competed at Berlin and Cannes, and who was awarded the Golden Alexander of honour at the Thessaloniki Film Festival in 2001.

The film, scripted by Asimakis Gialamas and Kostas Pretenteris, which featured cinematographer Nikos Kavoukidis (who attended the screening and had a conversation in front of the audience with Orestis Andreadakis), is set on the Greek island of Spetses, one of the most exclusive islands, a summer resort for aristocrats, shipowners, and the wealthy of various kinds, who today travel from their yachts to their mansions by helicopter. There is only one type of motor vehicle in Spetses, the few public taxis, so travel is still by horse-drawn carriage, as shown in the film, or by bicycle. Jenny Jenny, filmed in 1966, a year before the coup that installed the dictatorship in Greece, starts from a political issue to establish the feud between a local loukoumi manufacturer, Skoutaris —played by the charismatic and prestigious theatre actor Dionysis Papagiannopoulos (Voyage to Cythera, T. Angelopoulos, 1984)— and the shipowner Kassandris, his opponent. The latter is running his nephew Nikos Mandas (Andreas Barkoulis), until now abroad, for MP, while Skoutaris passionately supports Gortsos, who is already in the lead. When Skoutaris’ daughter (played by Jenny Karezi) realises her father’s financial problems, she accepts Kassandris’ proposal of a temporary marriage to his nephew in exchange for bailing out her father and furthering the young man’s political future. The white wedding, however, will bring unexpected events.

The first is Skoutaris’ acceptance of the new son-in-law, despite having been a virulent supporter of his leader, because he sees a horizon of prosperity and success for his family by being related to him. All the vehemence aimed at winning votes for Gortsos is reversed after the announcement of the engagement to convince the same manipulable villagers of Mandas’s excellence. However, the real protagonist is Jenny, the confectioner’s daughter, a character who is presented to us from her first appearance as an intelligent, cultured, studious, and modern young woman (her outfits, as well as the decorations of the shipowner’s mansion or the nightclubs, are a sixties marvel). Jenny is eager to finish her thesis to leave Greece and continue studying abroad, and enjoying the friendship of the tycoon Kassandris, she has free access to his well-stocked library of first editions, where she goes every day to work on her project. There, he meets Nikos, a childhood friend, who returns from the United States to serve his uncle’s interests as a deputy.

The comic plot of misunderstandings, false bigamy, cross-interests and the tradition of uniting families through marriage, overlap in Jenny Jenny with the freshness of the smart protagonist, whose good sense leads her to accept the deal, to end up in a sincere marriage with the young forced politician and, above all, to assert her personal purpose, independence and freedom, within a sentimental relationship. The modernity of Dimopoulos‘ proposal is groundbreaking and at the same time contemporary, because it shows traditions and customs as immovable and at the same time, a new generation, especially a woman, who brings more progressive values, typical of a more open and advanced society. Among the curiosities of the film, we can mention that it was the fourth time that Papagiannopoulos and Karezi played father and daughter, and that the wedding dress was the one she had worn at her wedding to Zahos Hajifotiou.

We bid farewell to a magnificent fourth edition of Evia Film Project with the screening of Stelios (Yorgos Tsemberopoulos, 2024), starring Christos Mastoras, the biopic about the Greek singer Stelios Kazantzidis, adored by several generations, and whose songs were not missing in a closing that was a ‘see you soon’, for those in love with cinema and not least with the Greek summer.