So my heart loved the movie, but my intellect was concerned about the movie’s implications, which means that my movie experience reflects the tale told in this movie perfectly. Melina Mercouri is a force of nature and her character, Ilya, has a feminist take on Greek culture & the oldest profession-she chooses. It is a different take on the Pygmalion tale except it takes on Biblical tones, particularly using an American as the serpent who introduces the knowledge of good & evil thus contaminating the idyllic Greek world & ruining happiness. Basically, don’t over think things & follow your bliss, but there is also a more revolutionary impulse: concept of a free, unexploited sex worker, rejecting women being controlled by men, civil unrest. Still there were aspects of the movie that I found troubling. If I recall, anything European, particularly Swedish or Greek, was fetishized by American as exotic and naturally sexual so I would love to have a Greek reading on Never on a Sunday and discover whether or not it is considered offensive. An alternative reading is that Greeks are controlled by emotions. On the other hand, Americans are all awkward intellect. Also I personally find it problematic that the truly free woman’s only desire is to have sex with an entire village and any visiting sailor if she likes the man, and she can only be encumbered by knowledge like Eve recognizing that she is naked. So a woman with knowledge is a problem. Side eye.