Carmen: Dance, Spectacle and a Thin Thread of a Plot
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-minus
Filmmakers complain, with justification, that movie reviewers who gripe about the formulaic mainstream entertainments, typically show no patience for experimental works that expand boundaries of what movies can be.
Carmen, the debut film from French dancer-choreographer Benjamin Millepied, is an example of a work that flagrantly colours outside the recognized lines, blending melodrama, myth, dance and stagey spectacle.
The result doesn’t coalesce into a neat bundle, but at moments, it’s peculiarly exciting.
Carmen (Melissa Barrera) and her troubled ex-Marine lover Aidan (Paul Mescal)
Loosely inspired by the 19th-century novella by Prosper Mérimée and the Georges Bizet opera about an Andalusian femme fatale, Millepied’s film stars Melissa Barrera (Scream VI, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights) as the titular character. Here, she’s reimagined as a Mexican singer and dancer, who flees her native country after the murder of her mother.
After that, following a shoot-out at the U.S. border, she finds herself on the run with a burned-out marine vet, Aidan (Aftersun’s Paul Mescal) who helps transport her to Los Angeles, where her relative, Masilda (Pedro Almodovar’s angular-featured muse, Rossy de Palma) runs a nightclub.
That wisp of a narrative (written by Millepied along with Loïc Barrere and Birdman’s Alexander Dinelaris) forms the connection between a series of ritualistic musical and dance sequences. These are set to a tumultuous score filled with chanting choruses and violin squeaks by Nicholas Britell (Succession, Moonlight) and acrobatically shot in widescreen by cinematographer, Jörg Widmer (The Tree of Life, Pina).
We begin, not in realism, but in what seems to be a symbolic confrontation. In the desert, a middle-aged woman, Zilah (Marina Tamayo), stomps on a wooden board, performing the zapateado (a Mexican dance, related to flamenco). Two gunmen arrive, seeking her daughter, Carmen. But when Zilah refuses to help them, the slam of her foot is followed by a gunshot as one of them shoots her dead.
Subsequently, Carmen comes home, grieves over her mother’s corpse and, before departing, sets their home ablaze. Fire, along with sand and water, become motifs that run through the film.
Separately, on the American side of the border, we meet Aidan, apparently suffering from PTSD, who sits in the desert with his guitar and sings mournful songs, until his sister Julieann (Nicole da Silva) pushes him into accepting a border guard job.
On his first shift, during an altercation with illegal migrants, Adrian ends up shooting his trigger-happy partner and then escapes with Carmen through the desert in a pickup truck.
En route, they make a night stop at a fairground, where Carmen joins a group of women dancers in a twirling performance under the midway lights. The couple’s next stop is the Los Angeles dance hall, run by Carmen’s fantastically flamboyant family friend, Masilda (the screen-dominating De Palma) for another set-piece dance. Masilda promises them protection for as long as she can manage.
Mescal, whose roles have also included the television series, Normal People and The Lost Daughter, and earned an Oscar nomination for Aftersun, has become a specialist in characters suffering from repressed male anguish. He’s not really a dancer (more of a runner, jumper and lifter) but his awkward physicality makes a vivid contrast with the earthy, graceful Barrera. Her character is less a personality than a mythical free spirit (“a poem made into a woman,” Masilda tells her) who only emerges into three dimensions when singing or dancing.
Questions about the believability of the actors’ passion are irrelevant: These are archetypal characters, playing out male-female roles, somehow related to the violence of America militarism, both abroad and at its borders.
The film’s climactic showdown encapsulates both the flaws and the strengths of Millepied’s unorthodox creativity: To raise money, Aidan is compelled to engage in a bare-knuckle battle to the death. The fight takes entirely inside a ring of krumping dancers with a referee who doubles as a rap announcer (Tracy “the D.O.C.” Curry), chanting a demon-voice growl, as he struts around the bloodied fighters.
It’s deeply silly but also kind of great, with some of the best onscreen dance-fighting since Zoolander.
Carmen. Directed by Benjamin Millepied. Written by Alexander Dinelaris, Loïc Barrère and Benjamin Millepied. Stars Paul Mescal, Melissa Barrera, Rossy de Palma, Nicole da Silva, Benedict Hardie, Elsa Pataky, Tracy "The D.O.C." Curry, Marina Tamayo and Tara Morice. In theatres May 5.