"Carmen" doesn't quite sweep you away with love story but still casts an entrancing spell

Carmen (2023)

A reimagining of Georges Bizet’s French opera “Carmen” wouldn’t seem like everyone’s cup of tea, as enough doomed romances populate the cinematic landscape. It can be operatic, but this isn’t really that same “Carmen.” In this loose retelling, French dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied makes his feature directorial debut, co-adapting with Alexander Dinelaris and Loïc Barrère from a novel by Prosper Merimee and “The Gypsies,” a poem by Alexander Pushkin. Millepied’s first film or not, “Carmen” is strange, passionate and thrillingly alive, playing like a limbo between gritty reality and a beguiling dream. If only the relationship at the center felt more compelling.

Pushing herself between being in a movie musical and carrying a horror franchise, Melissa Barrera continues to challenge herself yet again. Here, she plays the titular Carmen, a young woman who flees the Mexican border after her flamenco-dancing mother is killed outside their home in the Chihuahuan Desert. When she does get over to America, her life is spared by Aidan (Paul Mescal), a PTSD-suffering Marine who toured in Afghanistan and has volunteered as a border patrol guard. Aidan does what he thinks is right to help Carmen, shooting his racist partner and taking her on the lam to Los Angeles. They find refuge in a nightclub run by Masilda (Rossy de Palma), Carmen’s flamboyant godmother. Of course, Carmen and Aidan will fall in love, but can their love last when they’re running from the law? 

Modern dance and magical realism are peppered throughout, putting this immigration-cum-love story into a less archetypal box. The dance sequences play out in long takes like dizzying yet eloquent poetry. Whether at night, in the sun, or in a vibrant nightclub, these ethereal interpretive dance pieces are dazzlingly photographed by cinematographer Jörg Widmer with a choral score by Nicholas Britell, marryingly beautifully for a somewhat inevitable on-the-run-and-fall-in-love narrative. It’s just that Carmen and Aidan seem to fall for each other because they have to, and that’s inherently boring. With that said, Melissa Barrera and Paul Mescal do bring a fiery passion when they dance with each other. Barrera, in particular, is dynamite, and she has always been more than a pretty face; hopefully, this will prove it to her naysayers. Mescal also provides Aidan with a rugged sensitivity and conveys a lot with few words, and Rossy de Palma, one of Pedro Almodóvar’s muses, brings an incomparably commanding presence as Matilda. The love story doesn’t quite sweep you away as much as it should, but when “Carmen” works, it can be electrifying and cast an entrancing spell.  

Grade: B

Sony Pictures Classics is releasing “Carmen” (116 min.) in select theaters on April 21, 2023.