American cinema has tried its hand at Carmen already – including 1954’s Broadway hit Carmen Jones and a “hip-hopera” starring a baby-faced Beyoncé Knowles in 2001 – but the cultural influence of Bizet’s opera is far more profound in its country of origin, France. I’m guessing most Americans couldn’t guess at the plot but would perk up at Bizet’s Toreador Song or Habanera. They won’t perk here, as first-time feature director Benjamin Millepied discards the opera and most of the plot for a kinda-sorta-somewhat-inspired-by vision of a woman and man on the lam from the law, running headlong toward tragedy.
In his own words, Millepied stresses his film is “not a re-telling or adaptation of Carmen, but an entirely new and unique artistic endeavor.” The emphasis, for better and for worse, should be placed on “artistic.” This is an art film – Millepied, a French dancer and choreographer, has reconceived Carmen (along with co-writers Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Loïc Barrère) as a vehicle for dance. Is it weird he didn’t cast professional dancers as his leads? Maybe, but what he got in the trade-off was two actors of almost staggering magnetism.
A commanding Melissa Barrera, late of the Scream franchise and In the Heights, plays Carmen, a young woman who flees her home when her mother is murdered by a drug cartel. (I think? The film’s inciting incident, a gripping flamenco performance by Marina Tamayo, ends in bloodshed for reasons I did not understand.) Carmen’s fraught journey from Mexico to the U.S. puts her in the path of Aidan (Mescal, recent Oscar nominee for Aftersun). A Marine reluctantly picking up work with a border militia, Aidan becomes Carmen’s unlikely protector. After a bloody skirmish in the desert, they go on the run; destination: California, where Carmen’s godmother (played by Pedro Almodóvar regular Rossy de Palma) runs a nightclub and promises safe haven.
Well, “California”: The film was actually shot in Australia, an effective dupe for the anonymous American landscape of deserts and highways Carmen and Aidan cross. There’s a dreamy unreality to the film that works in its favor, helping to assuage the narrative’s sometimes-incoherence and to soft-land the first time a full dance number breaks out. Fully 40 minutes pass between the opening flamenco performance and this all-woman dance at an abandoned carnival (an odd delay in what is ostensibly a dance film) but Millepied and A Hidden Life cinematographer Jörg Widmer shoot this performance and others in unbroken, swooping takes that don’t always catch the steps but transfer the feeling to the viewer: that we, too, are bodies in motion.
Though Bizet’s music has been binned, the terrific American composer Nicholas Britell (Succession, Moonlight) supplies a new score, mournful and doomsaying and heavily choral. (The lyrics, sung in French, are apparently drawn from the original opera’s lyrics by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy.) Britell’s score super-juices the tragic pall over the film, while Barrera and Mescal channel Romeo and Juliet as the star-crossed lovers who communicate mostly in looks and the occasional pas de deux. What the film itself is trying to communicate proves more elusive; whatever meaning Millepied meant to impart by tethering this “entirely new and unique artistic endeavor” to a century-and-a-half-old opera never quite made sense to me.
Carmen will be available on VOD from July 11.
This article appears in July 7 • 2023.
