Suntan

Argyris Papadimitropoulos's third feature is a Lolita-inspired companion to Athina Rachel Tsangari's Chevalier (2015), which also explored the crisis in Greek masculinity and featured Efthymis (aka Makis) Papadimitriou as a middle-aged schlubb with a shocking lack of self-awareness. This time, the hirsute thesp plays Kostis, a 42-year-old doctor who has fetched up on the small island of Antiparos after an unspecified mishap. But he singularly fails to learn his lesson and becomes besotted with Anna (Elli Tringou), a vivacious blonde half his age, whose carelessly free-spirited signals Kostis consistently misreads. It all leads to a humiliating and somewhat implausible dénouement that raises troubling questions about Papadimitropoulos's depiction of women and the moral message he and co-writer Syllas Tzoumerkas seek to impart to audiences. In keeping with Greece's "Weird Wave" and its penchant for provocation, this is often squirm-inducingly amusing, as the sun cream-coated Kostis strives to keep in with the in-crowd. But while cinematographer Christos Karamanis's contrasts between the sun-kissed seascapes and the tawdry nightclubs remain acute, the tonal shift in the final reel is decidedly resistible.