‘Carmen’ Review: Paul Mescal and Melissa Barrera Exhilaratingly Reimagine a Classic

As written by the legendary French composer Georges Bizet, the 19^th-century opera “Carmen” has a classic femme fatale at its heart: a fiery, free-spirited and seductive woman headed for her inevitable demise through the downfall of a former lover. So take it with a grain of salt upon hearing the title “Carmen,” in this case a beautiful, dreamlike and defiantly experimental film directed by Benjamin Millepied.

Yes, the tragedy, beauty, love, and passion that define Bizet’s exquisite late Romantic-era masterpiece are all in here in Millepied’s directorial debut. But Millepied’s runaway Carmen, as imagined by writers Loïc Barrere, Alexander Dinelaris and Lisa Loomer, is not so much a doomed temptress archetype as a freedom-hungry firebrand in search of her voice and identity.

In that regard, it would be unfair to claim that Millepied’s “Carmen” is an adaptation of Bizet’s timeless story. In fact, the director himself—a celebrated choreographer who once signed his named under Darren Aronofsky’s ethereal “Black Swan”—would be the first to tell you as much. So let’s call his “Carmen” a loose—very loose—derivative of it instead, one that transposes the original’s Spain-based story to the US-Mexico border, surrounding it with various urgent queries that concern our immigrant communities and our society at large.

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This “Carmen” gets deeply soaked in tragedy, grief and desert dust almost immediately, when Marina Tamayo’s unapologetic flamenco dancer Zilah gets silenced by the murderous drug cartel at the start of the film. This leaves her daughter Carmen (Melissa Barrera) alone and helpless in Mexico, causing her to escape to the other side of the border to unite with her mother’s best friend, Masilda (Rossy de Palma). Carmen’s getaway sets a series of events in motion that seals her fate with Aidan (Paul Mescal), an unwilling border patrolman and a recently discharged Marine with PTSD. Rebelling against his armed partner during a lethal impasse at the border, Aidan joins Carmen in her flee and the two passionately fall in love.

It’s impossible to overstate the effortless movie star allure of Barrera, a gifted actor, singer and dancer whose energy and earthy charisma lifted up Jon M. Chu’s “In the Heights” the second she appeared in it. Barrera shines just as brightly here as she swans across barren fields and neon-lit alleys, captured through Jörg Widmer’s all-encompassing wide lens. Now a connoisseur of unspoken anguish on the heels of “Normal People” and “Aftersun,” Mescal also feels at home in “Carmen,” with his mournful body language and perennially grief-stricken eyes.

Even when “Carmen” occasionally hits some narrative roadblocks with the trio of writers not knowing how to fluently weave together dance and plot, Barrera and Mescal consistently burn the screen, and our foolish hearts. In that regard, their elegantly choreographed dance steps sometimes give us two bodies draped over each other in desperate need of becoming whole, and other times, fearlessly confront the viewer with moves both scorching and unmistakably character-defining.

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Just as heroic in this project is Nicholas Britell, one of the most exciting American composers working today. Through his mournful compositions for Barry Jenkins and his purposely dueling minor-key notes for “Succession,” Britell is no stranger to heartbreak and conflict in his arrangements, and those qualities, he injects into the score of “Carmen” openhandedly.

Amplified by the human voices of a choir (singing some verses from Bizet’s own “Carmen”), swooning strings and immersive synths, the effect of Britell’s sound is heart-rending and alarming in equal measure. Elsewhere, his musical collaborators Julieta Venegas, Taura Stinson and The D.O.C. (who raps along a riveting fight scene) complete and complement Britell’s work with original songs, artistically shifting the shape of dreams and reality that we perceive on the screen.

There are times when “Carmen” veers into abstract territory and can’t sustain the momentum it has established in its earlier moments. Despite de Palma’s captivating performance and presence, the club scenes that involve her character sadly feel a little out of step with the film’s overall rhythm and work better as standalone dance clips.

Still, Millepied deserves all the credit in the world for imagining something that feels so vast, major and unapologetically big-screen out of a nearly 150-year-old work of art. Amid open, Terrence Malick-ian vistas, nighttime compositions as studiously detailed as a Gregory Crewdson photograph and breathtaking dance sequences, what Millepied has pulled off with “Carmen” feels like a feat of visual and aural imagination.