Carmen: The New Priest is a She, and She Has a Guardian Pigeon
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
Canadian actor-director Valerie Buhagiar’s Carmen is a light, crowd-pleasing feminist romance, set in the writer-director’s birthplace on the Mediterranean island nation of Malta. Gossamer thin in the plotting but playful and gorgeous to look at, it’s a warm message of midlife liberation.
English actress Natascha McElhone (Solaris, Designated Survivor) plays Carmen, the middle-aged unmarried sister of the stern, traditional village priest, Father Francis (Henry Zammit Cordina). According to local tradition, she is obliged to serve as his unmarried housekeeper. Dressed in drab clothes, with threads of silver through her dark pile of hair, Carmen, carries herself in the posture of subjugation, head bowed, eyes cast down.
Faux priest Carmen has a date with a confessional.
Muttering village parishioners confirm our impression: “She’s like the living dead; she never smiles and never speaks,” says one woman parishioner to another.
When her brother, the priest, dies, Carmen abruptly finds herself without a job or home. But God, or Fate or Dumb Chance intervenes in a way that reveals a path forward.
Carmen assumes the next-best thing to a cloak of invisibility, peering around corners to witness the lives of the villagers and, eventually, hiding in the confessional box to hear their sins.
On the night after she loses her job, home and buries her brother, Carmen wanders the streets with a suitcase, and, follows a pigeon. (The pigeon recurs as a sort of mischievous Holy Ghost.)
She falls asleep in a bell tower and awakens to the young bell-ringer, forced to break up his girlfriend, the sister to the incoming priest and therefore, according to local custom, compelled to live in celibacy.
While hiding out in the church’s confession box one day, Carmen finds herself mistaken for the new priest, who no one has yet met. She hears a woman’s confession and offers her absolution, along with some unorthodox advice, in contrast to the usual rules on wifely obedience.
The experience awakens a new sense of power to change both the community and her own life. More women and children offer their confessions to the false priest, and her kindly, constructive advice goes down well. Church donations soar and somehow no one seems to notice the new priest has never yet shown his face.
The film’s second act sees Carmen taking a more proactive and sacrilegious role in determining her future, heading off to the capital city of Valletta to pawn some of church candlesticks and the chalice. The shop is run by a handsome young Maltese-Canadian guy, Paolo (Steven Love) who feeds her wine and lunch, and lets her take a nap in his apartment, opening up the opportunity for a fling.
Throughout, the script unabashedly piles on the whimsy along with the anti-patriarchal message: Carmen has gauzy flashbacks to a tragic youthful romance with an Arab boy, her magical realist dreams, and those persistent appearances by her guardian pigeon.
But amusing sight gags and the fable-like spirit of the film distracts from such mundane issues of credibility. Even a potentially darker episode, where Carmen narrowly escapes a sexual assault, resolves in an unlikely rescue, suggesting that, despite her impiety, there’s an angel looking over Carmen after all.
Though this version of Carmen has no direct connections to Georges Bizet’s 19th century opera Carmen, the pigeon does remind us of the tragic cigarette girl’s famous entrance aria, “L’amour est un oiseu rebelle” (Love is a rebellious bird.) Also, the Maltese Carmen does trade in her black mourning clothes for a fire-engine red ensemble, a blazing declaration of her re-awakened passion for life.
Carmen, written and directed by Valerie Buhagiar and starring Natascha McElhone, opened theatrically in August in Canada. Available on VOD September 30.