![]() ![]() Newly orphaned, her beautiful daughter Carmen (“In the Heights” breakout Melissa Barrera, more than cementing her star appeal) has no choice but to make a break for the border in the desperate hope that she might find refuge at a California nightclub owned by her godmother. A few moments later, Zilah’s thundering steps - the wild heartbeat of the film to come - are replaced by the sound of a single gunshot. ![]() We begin in the Chihuahuan desert, where a proud flamenco dancer named Zilah (Marina Tamayo) summons a ferocious storm from the flimsy wooden board underneath her feet as cartel goons draw their guns on her. Imagine watching Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” and Julie Taymor’s “Titus” double-projected on the same screen and you might have a vague idea of the strange no-man’s land that Millepied’s debut feature begins dancing across from the moment it starts. ![]() Loosely inspired by Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera of the same name - so loosely, in fact, that Millepied thinks of his film as less of a re-telling or adaptation than he does a version of Bizet’s tragedy from a parallel universe - this “Carmen” moves the action from the southern tip of Spain to the northern cusp of Mexico, pares the source material’s busy story down to the brink of abstraction, and transmutes its soaring arias into defiant ballets of freedom. And yet, it’s undeniably exhilarating to watch one of the world’s most accomplished choreographers team up with one of its most virtuosic composers (Nicolas Britell) for the kind of aggressively unclassifiable movie that would never exist if not for these two artists reaching beyond their disciplines to create it themselves. Located somewhere between a classic opera, a modern dance piece, and a deadly fever dream - between the timeless beauty of ancient myth and the modern nightmare of America’s current immigration policies - Benjamin Millepied’s “ Carmen” is stretched across a few too many borders to ever feel like it’s standing on solid ground. ![]()
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