The credits for 'Carmen' read that it’s “inspired” by the 1845 short novel by French writer Prosper Mérimée, which was also the source of the famous 1875 opera by Georges Bizet. In other words, it’s a slim connection, and you don’t have to know either the novel or the opera to realize the urgency and flamboyance of this film.
The story begins in the Mexican desert as undocumented Carmen, played by Melissa Barrera, and others are met by rogue American border guards. There’s a shootout, and Carmen winds up with Aiden, played by the Irish actorPaul Mescal, an American Marine, who kills one of the vigilantes, and the two of them then run away to Los Angeles.
This synopsis doesn’t get to the wild spirit of the picture, which is full of loomings, forebodings, and portentous choral music.
Director Benjamin Millepied comes to 'Carmen' as a ballet dancer and choreographer. Before any real story action plays out, a woman in black dances flamenco on a makeshift plywood floor in the middle of a desert. All through the movie, dance sequences appear, and pull you inside the passionate spirit of the film which rumbles throughout the picture.
Like the original story of 'Carmen,' the movie is about grand passion on the run. The film opens with an aerial view of an immense, dry landscape, made even bigger by that music. So you feel right in your gut, the craggy, scary and untamed inner contours of the film.
The movie’s at the same time explosive and dreamy. The Flamenco dancer in the beginning is dancing her defiance at two thugs who’ve come to kill her. She doesn’t talk to them; she dances at them. Her footsteps on the plywood are hard and real, and so are the armed killers, but the look of the scene is so improbable that it feels like two planes of existence balanced against each other. 'Carmen' isn’t dreamy in the way of pastel children floating around a filmy moon; it’s a unique, hard-edged poetry. The sequence also sets the story in motion because you soon realize that the woman is the mother of Carmen, and her dance lets Carmen escape from the thugs.
The picture throbs with the power of its women, and that power comes from the ability of art – dance – to make the chaos of life on the run emotionally coherent. The mother’s haunting friend Masilda tells Carmen her murdered mother made her to dance.
The movie 'Carmen' lives within the connections between women, and the creative energy of women. The men live in the physical. Early on, Aiden pounds on a punching bag, and later he fights bare-fisted hoping to win $10,000 for Carmen. But the women live in the imagination. In dance, Carmen rises above the limitations of the physical world. That’s her real escape.
This is not the first unorthodox version of 'Carmen.' Spanish director Carlos Saura made a Flamenco-dancing 'Carmen' in 1983. Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge starred in 'Carmen Jones' in 1954. The completely original French genius Jean-Luc Godard made 'First Name: Carmen' in 1983. There are at least two silent versions. Obviously, the story has staying power. But this 'Carmen' is good for right now. It looks at men and women; it looks at landscapes – natural and urban – that are dry, angry and inhospitable to human life, and it looks at the violence human beings commit against each other. This 'Carmen' offers no resolution to any of these catastrophes, but it shows that dancing them out can be one viable expression.
