(courtesy IMP Awards)
Losing yourself in a film is one of life’s greatest gifts.
There’s something about the aura and atmosphere of a well-made, lushly-conceived movie, especially seen as the cinema gods intended on the big screen, that lets slip all the cares and concerns of the world and plunges you into somewhere entirely, immersively different.
Carmen, the directorial debut of Benjamin Millipied, is one of those films that reshapers reality around you, a poetic triumph of rich emotion, lost-and-found humanity and some of the haunting music you will ever come across.
It is a thing of beauty, drawing from the idea of the famous opera by Bizet while dispensing with plot and setting, and transporting the eponymous heroine to a whole other place; in this case, the borders deserts of the USA and Mexico where Carmen (Melissa Barrera) has to escape a violently traumatic incident by escaping into the United States where events, again starkly and suddenly violent, connect her to Marine veteran Aidan (Paul Mescal) with the two deciding to seek perceived sanctuary in Los Angeles.
Theirs is a road trip borne not one of escape or touristic delight but of a desperate need to reach the one who might be able to offer Carmen a home, and it fashions these two wholly disparate souls into a couple who decide their destiny lies together.
But, of course, with their relationship birthed out of grief and loss, there’s little chance they can secure lasting happiness … or can they?
You are left hoping through this beautiful marriage of dance and song, style and emotional substance that the better angels of our destiny will embrace and envelope them and restore life to something that these two sudden young lovers deserve.
However, Carmen keeps you guessing throughout, never quite letting the titular character, who expresses herself in dance, the same style of escape and artistic expression as her mother, or her sweetly caring beau rest for anything more than a fleeting second.
In some ways it’s agonising to watch because you know that events that come out of so much violence and trauma likely can’t end well, especially in a film inspired by an opera which are famously predisposed to not fulfill any form of happy-ever-after (for the greater part, anyway) but for a while, with an unexpected new home, the swirling comfort of music and dance, and the love of the newly connected, you begin to hope, like they do, that some form of restoration, of redemption, and even of healing, might be possible.
Quite whether that happens must be left to the watching of this wholly gorgeous film, but suffice to say, it engages your emotions fiercely and without compromise, keeping you invested in the fate of Aidan and Carmen in a way that few films manage and fewer still actually deliver on.
What strikes you most completely about Carmen is how it is one of those rare films where the style and the emotional weight of the narrative sit in perfect, pleasing tension and harmony.
Millipied has committed his film to an intense stylistic approach full of intense flashbacks, dance – even the fight scene is choreographed with krumping and an aggressively melodic and fantastically rhythmic rap fuelling a high adrenaline moment in the movie – and singing (all ethereally delivered with a strong choral, almost medieval sensibility), and artistic breaks in the narrative where dialogue gives ways to the emotional release of losing yourself in art which one key character, Masilda (Rossy de Palma) promises Carmen will heal her.
Given what she’s been through, that’s a daringly expansive promise to make but with dance suffusing the entire film and used to advance the narrative and express the intensity of emotions that the two leads particularly experience, you begin to believe that dance might just be the saviour of these lost and grieving souls who may have found solace, home and maybe even a future together.
As observed, the future is a shaky proposition at the best of times in Carmen, imperilled by a past for which consequences must flow and a present that’s an unexpected gift but bound to lose its ability to shield them at some time with outcomes that you can only guess at but which Aidan and Carmen know can’t be entirely or even a little good.
Millipied’s great trick in Carmen is not to lose all these stylistic touches subsume the humanity and intense emotional moments of the film; so successful is he, in fact, at keeping the two in tension that this is one of the few films this reviewer has seen where some almost indulgent style affectations actually end up carrying an enormous narrative and emotive weight without once collapsing in on themselves.
The proof that this union of style and emotive humanity works is the fact that you feel every last note and every last pounding of shoe on floor, you understand somewhere deep inside how much Aidan comes to mean to Carmen, and vice-versa and why it is they stick with each other when logic suggests, initially at least, that they should simply go their own separate ways.
Carmen is a film you don’t simply watch; you feel it in every part of you, and augmented by lushly beautiful cinematography, a score by Nicholas Britall that is lavishly haunting but emotionally accessible too, and a screenplay anchored by smart, fully-formed dialogue and the alternating beats of sanctuary and danger, two bouncing each other like a dance of hope and threat intertwined, you live it.
It’s a sublimely wonderful experience, and while, like this reviewer you may watch the trailer and wonder just how substance lies behind the quite deliberate style, rest assured that this is one film that knows how to balance the two to perfection and to deliver a story that doesn’t just delight the senses of sight and hearing but which reaches deep your heart and soul and makes you feel things in a way that you will not easily forget and which stay with you, largely because of the starkly affecting humanity writ large, long after the lights have come and reality of your own making, beckons once more.