Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Benjamin Millepied
Starring: Melissa Barrera, Paul Mescal, Rossy de Palma, Elsa
Pataky, Tracy Curry
Paul Mescal and Melissa Barrera prove themselves
all-singing, all-dancing talents in choreographer turned director
Benjamin Millepied's loose adaptation of Bizet's classic opera
Carmen. Bizet's work was itself a very loose adaptation of a novella by
Prosper Mérimée. Overt the decades several filmmakers, including Otto
Preminger, Jean-Luc Godard and Cecil B. DeMille, have offered their own
distinctive takes on the opera, diverging from the source material to
considerable degrees but retaining the central figure of a free-spirited
but tragic heroine.
That's what we get with Millepied's film, which he co-wrote with
Loïc Barrère. What's different about this take is that the roles
of the titular gypsy and her soldier lover have been largely reversed.
Possibly with a female and gay audience in mind, the latter is now
posited as the tragic, brooding figure, with Mescal continuing the
taciturn, smoldering schtick that has become his trademark in his brief
career.
Mescal plays Aidan, a young veteran of the conflict in Afghanistan who
is struggling to adapt to civilian life back in the American SouthWest.
He just wants to spend his days strumming his guitar and crooning folk
tunes but his sister convinces him to join a ragtag border patrol
comprised of official agents and gun-toting vigilantes. When one of the
latter kills a group of Mexicans he and Aidan discover hiding in a
truck, Aidan shoots him dead before he can put a bullet in Carmen
(Barrera), who hopped across the border when her mother was similarly
gunned down.
For unclear reasons, Aidan and Carmen decide to stick together and head
for Los Angeles, where the sanctuary of a friend of Carmen's mother
awaits. Why an illegal immigrant would want to hang out with a fugitive
and thus draw extra attention to herself is never quite addressed, but I
guess she just has a crush on the handsome, brooding soldier.
Carmen never quite figures out what story it's telling,
or whom it's focused upon. For a brief period it's a road movie, a sort
of Wild at Heart light, as Aidan and Carmen make their way
through the sweaty SouthWest, having slightly surreal encounters with
carnival troupes and a disappearing cabbie who might be an angel. The
Los Angeles they find is straight out of David Lynch's version of the
City of Angels, complete with its own version of
Mulholland Dr.'s Club Silencio, run by a crooning Spanish matriarch (Almodovar
regular Rossy de Palma). But the darkness and sinister threat of
Lynch's films is largely absent, and we never really feel like our young
heroes are in much danger here.
The superficial storytelling means Mescal and Barrera never quite click as a screen couple, except when
they're sharing a dancefloor, at which points the film erupts into
life. Millepied's previous life as a choreographer doesn't entirely gel
with his new role as a movie director, with some of the dance numbers
edited in a sloppy manner that betrays a lack of experience in directing
dance for the screen. But crucially, Mescal and Barrera can convincingly
throw down a few moves, unlike say Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in
La La Land. All of Carmen's best moments involve at least one of its central pair
strutting their stuff, though its worst moment is a boxing match set to
a cringey piece of Hamilton-esque hip-hop. By that late point the movie
has well and truly lost sight of what it wants to be, but it leaves us
in no doubt that we've spent two hours in the presence of two young
stars on the rise.
