[Review] Carmen (4/10)

Title - Carmen
Production - Chapter 2, Goalpost Pictures, TF1 Pictures
Starring - Melissa Barrera, Paul Mescal, Rossy de Palma, Nicole da Silva, Elsa Pataky, Marina Tamayo, Benedict Hardie
Writer - Alexander Dinelaris, Loic Barrere, Benjamin Millepied
Director - Benjamin Millepied
Release - 14 June 2023

When a movie wants to have me as an audience, I will be putting aside my time and attention to go into the movie; more often than not, with an open mind and with the greatest hope that I will love the movie.

That's me going into Carmen. It's not a movie, not really. It was beautifully shot, every frame was carefully designed so that when it came out on the screen it would be a work of art. But ask anyone who is a Zac Snyder fan and have seen Sucker Punch. That movie looked fantastic, but if you listened to the dialogue it became a bad movie; because the writing was just bad.

There's almost no writing for Carmen. It was so minimal that the visuals of the scenes themselves tried to drive what little story it had forward. The dialogue was almost non-existence and was never there as expositions but rather just as toppings. And probably because of that, there was no chemistry between the two leads.

The actors tried really hard to say those words with some kind of context that were not there. We never found out what killed Melissa Barrera's character's mother. We never found out why Paul Mescal's  character fired the gun. A very inconsistent characteristic because he was the one who kept shouting not to fire. But all these happened just so the writers could have these two characters collide. If it happened this way in the short stories this movie was based off of, there should be more to it in the source material.

This was Barrera's movie, you could tell she poured her heart into it. Mescal on the other hand, why was he even cast for this? From the trailer I thought he maybe was also trained in the art of dance, like Barrera who clearly was. But by the end of the movie, I realized there really wasn't much for Mescal to do here. They should have cast someone with a dance background as well, someone like Jamie Bell - also British, has a more convincing American accent than Mescal, and did a dance movie.

A dance movie - Billy Elliot. Carmen, alas, wants to be a dance movie; but there was nothing else to it. Every scene was trying to get to the next dance number (and they were really few... but if you are not interested in dance anyway then there's really nothing here for you). In the end, it was the dance scenes that was the real motivation the movie was made; because there was no story (and it's worth noting that Benjamin Millepied, is more well known for his dance choreography than directing.) The audience had no window that could take us into the lives of these characters. So all the drama the characters felt, they were intrinsic and independent. We were left out in the cold.

But the movie did look good. The best scene was that opening sequence when we hard cut to Marina Tamayo doing a dance pose. She looked fierce, strong, beautiful, and she took my breath away. Everything sort of went downhill from there.