Patty Is Such A Girly Name

At the outset, Patty Is Such A Girly Name seems poised to deliver a familiar coming-of-age sports drama. Daphne Patiri (Mort Klonarakis), nicknamed Patty, is eager to escape her small island town to reach judo stardom. Everyone keeps remarking on how “girly” her nickname sounds. While its link to her last name is logical, the supposed femininity of “Patty” feels overstated and its symbolic weight remains unclear. Perhaps it carries resonance for Greek audiences, but that meaning is lost in translation, turning into an oddly persistent refrain about gender and naming that is never fully unpacked.

She lives in Ikaria (yes, Icarus), and that myth of flight and fall is woven through the narrative, though with such bluntness that it borders on parody. Greek mythology, long since absorbed and reinterpreted by Anglo filmmakers, returns here in its most literal, capital-M Metaphorical form. The allusions to wings, heights and downfall are less like themes and more like signposts.

Raised by a single mother, Daphne’s world changes when a renowned judoka and sensei Yuri Savvidis (played with a haunted restraint by Vangelis Mourikis), emerges from self-imposed exile and takes her under his wing. Yuri re-enters the judo world carrying the legacy of an Olympic gold athlete, Zoe Geranian (Filippa Kaye), he once guided – a partnership that dissolved for reasons still unclear.

Initially, writer/director Giorgos Georgopoulos promises a solid underdog narrative: the newcomer, the austere mentor, the slow grind to excellence, only to pivot away from it. What begins as a sports drama becomes a queer awakening and, later, a meditation on power, mentorship, and the blurred moral terrain of post-MeToo reckoning. It gestures toward both the courage of survivors and the murkier ambiguities that public narratives often flatten. The ambition is admirable; the execution uneven.

The spark between Daphne and Zoe ignites early, when the two face off on the mat. Their first encounter is combative, but the friction quickly turns into something charged and uncertain. A rooftop scene “overlooking” the Parthenon encapsulates the film’s precarious reach: Zoe gives Daphne a pair of binoculars and remarks, “If you lean over as much as you can and look right there, you’ll see it.” The line unintentionally becomes a thesis. The viewer similarly must lean, stretch, and mentally fill in gaps to grasp the film’s thematic aims. Ambition, exploitation, queer vulnerability, mentorship as seduction: the threads are visible but tangled.

The Greek director’s third narrative feature keeps reinventing itself. Each mode has merit; together they strain emotional coherence. In attempting to be three films at once, Patty Is Such A Girly Name dances too close to its own metaphor. Like Icarus flying toward the sun, its wings melt under the heat of competing ideas. The ascent is bold; the fall unsurprising.

And yet, its sincerity is disarming. The naturalistic palette and unfussy camerawork reveal an Athens rarely shown onscreen: industrial docks, damp gyms, apartments shaded by cranes rather than olive trees. A city that refuses mythic postcard romance. In those moments, Georgopoulos finds something sharp and lived-in.

By the time the tidy moral resolve arrives, the film has already exhausted its imagery. Still, its confusion feels honest. Growth is rarely linear and flights are rarely smooth. Patty Is Such A Girly Name wants to critique the myths it also leans upon. Its reach exceeds its grasp, but that restless reach, awkward, idealistic, self-interrogating, gives it a pulse.

Reviewed on: 07 Nov 2025