Fresh and Exciting

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The theme and the setting attract a viewer, but then one's enthusiasm is slowly dissipated by a Chinese water torture of watching the glowering face of the protagonist. Not even the voyeuristic examination of perfect tanned and naked bodies can pay the viewer sufficiently for enduring this film. The emotional issues the doctor faces are settled in the normal male before high school graduation and never need revisiting.

I was not preparing for something serious after the first 10-15 minutes of the film; after which my wife left the room, offended by the nudity. We are both Greek-born and were used to the old ways, though we were quite aware of what modernism has brought to Greek beaches. But the movie was not about nudity. It was the drama of a middle-aged man who had not tasted the joys of life, being glum and relatively ordinary. But a young Aphrodite partying with her friends caught his attention. The movie relentlessly follows his obsession, and if Nabokov invented Lolita, this story gets more intense. I would say the Greeks have learned something about tragedy. I was dazzled by the excellent photography and the gorgeous Greek island. Not an absolute masterpiece but close to one.

An unhappy middle-aged doctor is posted to a Greek island where he meets a hedonistic group of young people, one of which, a beautiful, liberated girl, he falls for.This is the kind of film that puritanical, emotionally stunted Hollywood - and probably even the rest of increasingly Islamified Western Europe - is not capable of making nowadays. It's a searingly human drama about unrequited love, the consequences of ageing, and the depths to which a human can sink when failure and rejection become commonplace. It's brave, bold and beautiful.Casually erotic (the actress who plays the frequently nude Anna could be described as cinematic Viagra), superbly acted by the lead (his character has to plummet to depths that are excruciating to watch) and unnervingly accurate in whatever scene it turns its eye to, it dares to tell a story that is as dark as we all are beneath our exteriors. And it triumphs.The outraged person who gives this film 1/10 on this site hilariously appears not to have even seen it as they get a major plot point completely wrong.

Kostis, a glum, middle-aged doctor, arrives with his pot-belly and receding hairline on a small Greek island to run the local clinic. It is winter and the island feels quiet and isolated - conversation for Kostis consists mainly of the local ageing Lothario promising him a United Nations of 'pussy' when the tourist season starts. Sure enough, summer brings with it hordes of tourists, and Kostis falls in with a group of twentysomethings who, when they are not partying hard in the local nightclubs, spend their time on the clothing-optional beach. They are all sleek and lovely (excepting one particularly horrendous beard) and among them Kostis sticks out like a sore thumb, but they tolerate him until he starts to drink increasingly heavily and ignore his duties at the clinic, indicating he is not as amusingly harmless as he at first appeared.Efthymis Papadimitriou turns in a good performance, portraying well both Kostis' pathetic eagerness to please the youngsters and providing a nice line in staring-eyed obsessiveness. He is also brave, offering to the camera his doughy, hairy body which is in marked contrast to the tanned firmness of the younger actors. The other characters - both tourists and locals - are all pretty much two-dimensional stereotypes, with the exception of Anna, young leader of the group and object of Kostis' admiration. Elli Triggou manages to make her not too obnoxious.As soon as Kostis finds happiness with the group, movie law dictates that things are not going to end well and in that the film is entirely predictable - and I found that waiting for the inevitable embarrassment to happen distracted me from the rest of the film. So I am not sure I would bother to watch it again, but it was worth seeing once.