Carmen Review | Not so Operatic

An over-cranked, but occasionally fascinating cinematic experiment, renowned choreographer and first time feature director Benjamin Millepied’s take on Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen is a visual and audio feast, but a narrative misfire. Grappling with a wide array of influences, tones, and messages, Millepied’s Carmen has a lot of creative energy, but no channel that can contain it all. It certainly retains the opera’s sense of tragic melodrama, but this Carmen is trying so hard to impress that lasting emotional resonance is hard to come by.

The title role goes to rapidly rising star Melissa Barrera. Her Carmen has run away from her home in Mexico, pursued by a murderous cartel. Her attempt to cross into the United States via Texas is thwarted by a bunch of gun toting, trigger-happy rednecks that have been deputized by lazy border patrol officers. When she’s about to be shot in the middle of a gun fight, she’s saved by Aidan, played by equally rising star and recent Oscar nominee Paul Mescal. Aidan is a military veteran coping with depression and severe PTSD since his return. He only reluctantly agreed to join the border patrol after his sister pretty much begged him to get a paying job after nine months of sulking and playing his guitar to crowds of absolutely no one. Now wanted for killing the guy who was going to execute Carmen, he agrees to take her to California so she can meet up with an old family friend (Almodóvar regular Rossy de Palma) who might be able to set her up with a job, protection and stability.

Carmen is one of those films that has two things that don’t really work for every one thing that works well. It’s clear that Millepied (probably best known to most for his work on Black Swan, alongside his wife, Natalie Portman) had a vision in mind for his version of Carmen, but a lot of the decisions he’s made along the way tend to cancel each other out. It’s the sort of film where the passion and spirit to update this story are clear, but the motivations and techniques are head scratchers.

The cinematography from Jörg Widmer is highly accomplished, and the overall mise-en-scene is on point throughout, but in a bid to make things cinematic, Millepied is so focused on making everything look profound and epic to a point where it’s sometimes hard to take Carmen seriously as art. The opera and the novella that spawned it have no shortage of high drama, but by modernizing the story and introducing contemporary themes (many of which have been boiled down to their most basic and reductive terms), Millepied’s take often uncomfortably borders on being a second rate Baz Luhrmann riff.

That overburdened sense of style makes the shortcomings of the cobbled together script all the more obvious. The trio of writers brought on board (Loïc Barrere, Alexander Dinelaris, and a story credit for TV veteran Lisa Loomer) and Millepied seem to be at odds when it comes to deciding what elements should remain from the source material and what things need to be drastically changed. This means that – for the most part – only elements of the story that either fit into the creative team’s predetermined set of themes or bits that Millepied can make look as cool as possible on a visual level are being kept around. This leads to a lot of gaps and an energy that constantly ebbs and flows. It’s Carmen, but more akin to a summary of the source with a few paragraphs missing at random.

The musical score Nicholas Britell is outstanding, and it also fits perfectly with Millepied’s desire to make the story more accessible to contemporary viewers who might be unfamiliar with it. (Even though that approach has already been attempted in vastly different styles over the years.) Britell is giving Millepied a lot of great stuff to work with, and sometimes the director runs with it (a spectacular dance between de Palma and Barrera) and other times he absolutely squanders the chance to mount an engaging dance number (with a hip-hop flavoured dance fight being particularly embarrassing, despite being performed well). Although putting the focus on dance plays to Millepied’s strengths, the director is creatively stretched so thin that his best ideas and intentions aren’t rising to the surface.

Carmen is kept alive through its more baffling decisions by the well paired leads. Barrera and Mescal are wonderful choices to play wayward souls drawn to each other by deep emotional scarring, and their chemistry is very good. There’s a distinct twinkle in Carmen and Aidan’s eyes whenever they’re around each other, and Barrera and Mescal make a lovely on screen couple. It also helps that Barrera gets to show off her skills as versatile performer, impressing quite a bit when it comes to her dance sequences. (Mescal, on the other hand, has considerably less dancing to perform, but he acquits himself well, nonetheless.) They’re surrounded by great supporting performances from the likes of the flamboyant de Palma, Elsa Pataky as a fiery bartender, and Nicole de Silva as Aidan’s sister.

With Carmen, Millepied throws everything he has at the wall, and what it amounts to is a directorial vision that hasn’t progressed much from the music videos he’s made in the past. He’s talented and has a distinct eye, but when that’s applied to a film and story that should be taken either more seriously or with tongue firmly in cheek, the stop-and-start for a number approach feels more like a wonky visual album than a fully realized film. In individual moments, Carmen has moments of real beauty and performative force, but when taken as a whole, the sum of its good parts doesn’t add up to much.

Carmen opens at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto and Cineplex International Village in Vancouver on Friday, May 5, 2023. It opens in Montreal on Friday, May 12, and expands to additional Canadian cities throughout the spring and summer.