The heroine of director-choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s Carmen (★★★☆☆) isn’t the wanton temptress of Bizet’s classic opera. Portrayed by Scream queen Melissa Barrera, this raven-haired Carmen might put a bullet in a man if she has to, but that’s because she’s a survivor, not a betrayer.
In fact, her journey in this dance- and music-driven drama begins with a warning from her late mother, voiced from the beyond, that men are not to be trusted.
All men, or just one man, madre says, it’s all the same: they yearn for the tears, milk, and blood of womanhood. Mother makes a rock-solid point, borne out by the succession of hungry, violent men hounding Carmen’s path from Mexico to Los Angeles.
Traveling on foot with a group of migrants trekking north to the U.S. border through the Chihuahuan Desert, Carmen fatefully runs into one violent man, though, whose heart, contrary to her mother’s warning, appears to pump blood, not sand.
Ex-Marine Aidan, embodied by Aftersun Oscar nominee Paul Mescal as still waters running deeper than we can know, is introduced working out his boxing moves on a heavy bag hung from a carport. He’s hungry, but held back by post-combat trauma he can’t express.
Hoping to jog his spirit, and his bank account, his sister Julieanne (Nicole da Silva) hooks Aidan up with the local civilian Border Patrol, whose trigger-happy leader incites the deadly gunfight that throws Aidan and Carmen together, on the run from her enemies, his enemies, and the law.
Paul Mescal in Carmen
The first feature film from Millepied — former dance director of the Paris Opera Ballet, and choreographer of Black Swan — adapts Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen and its inspiration, The Gypsies, a narrative poem by Alexander Pushkin, into a rapturous visual ballet, blending dialogue, music by the brilliant Nicholas Britell (Moonlight), a few original songs, and dance.
Mescal, flattening his natural brogue into a flat, indiscernible American accent, sings and strums a sweetly sad ballad, laying Aidan’s open heart on the line.
Barrera, who, before she was dodging Ghostface, was high-kicking through the streets of Uptown Manhattan in In the Heights, serenades a fearful young migrant with a haunting melody, and later, performs a gorgeously-sung lament of impossible love.
The singing gives way to a luscious tango partnering Carmen with a handsome dancer from the enigmatic dive run by her godmother Masilda, played by the one and only Rossy de Palma, who delivers a typically impassioned, soulful turn.
The presence of Pedro Almodóvar’s illustrious muse signals, along with touches of magical realism, and the expressive costumes and choreography, the film’s bent towards artsy eccentricity, despite the ripped-from-the-headlines premise of a fatal standoff between migrants and a border patrol.
Rossy de Palma in Carmen
Millepied, with screenwriters Alexander Dinelaris and Loïc Barrère, has concocted a fable, not a screed or exposé, but a fairy-tale romance set in the iconic American West. Cinematographer Jörg Widmer shoots ribbons of highway laced through fields of golden grasses under bright blue skies with a foreigner’s fascination for the earthy palette and harsh terrain.
Carmen and Aidan hit the road in an ’88 Chevy pickup chased by muscle cars. In a different era, they’d be puffing clouds of Marlboros, too.
The pair generates plenty of heat in a sexy moonlit dance duet, and a brief love scene that unfolds like a tempestuous pas de deux. Barrera and Mescal’s obvious physical chemistry, however, can’t disguise that the film expends little effort, story-wise, shoring up their attraction beyond necessity in a hectic moment, and plain lust. They’re both two decent-seeming people, yet, ultimately, those still waters don’t run that deep.
But the view is gorgeous. Throughout, Widmer keeps the camera in smooth motion in sync with the action, be it acts of violence, or of rhythm and romance.
Millepied keeps the styles of music and choreography varied, taking us from Romani-inspired flamenco to a hip-hop-inflected boxing match dance number that plays like Stomp meets Fight Club. Dense with the atmosphere of desire, danger, and minor-key melancholy, it’s the world the film creates, more than the romance inside it, that seduces and wins the heart.
About halfway through Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach directs a love scene. I don't mean that there is a sex scene (those rarely appear in Baumbach's cinematic universe, except the mortifyingly awkward kind). I mean that Baumbach himself appears onscreen, in a wink-nod cameo, as a fictitious filmmaker, choreographing an intimate scene between our hero, Jay Kelly (played in flashback by Charlie Rowe), and an actress playing his wife (Eve Hewson), who becomes his real-life paramour, though not real real-life, but -- ah, who's to say what's real anyway?
Baumbach has never been the sort of director to place himself onscreen, but the indulgence fits with a certain metatextual thread in Jay Kelly, a wry Hollywood satire and wistful character study infused with the director's signature familial discord. Here is a film about making sense of your life when, as Jay puts it, "all my memories are movies"; a film about sifting through the thin thread that separates public persona and private identity. How much of your life is real when millions of people know and adore you for playing someone else? And what about the real family you neglected to pursue those celluloid dreams -- is it too late to make amends?
You've heard of Chekhov's Gun. Now consider "Chekhov's Bees." If a backyard apiary of bees is introduced at the beginning of the movie, the bees will be whipped into a frenzy by the film's end, terrorizing some poor character.
Bugonia, the fiendishly funny new nightmare from Greek filmmaker/provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things, The Lobster), bears out this theory. The bees belong to our troubled hero, Teddy Gatz (a shaggy-bearded, greasy-haired Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy theorist and amateur beekeeper who lives in an old house with his young, neurodivergent cousin, Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis). Teddy spends his days working a menial warehouse job and his nights traveling down YouTube rabbit holes and obsessively developing theories involving Andromedan aliens who intend to destroy humanity.
Given how often today's news outlets distort the truth or report outright lies, it's almost comical that E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel Ragtime was once dismissed by The New Yorker's editor William Shawn. Because Doctorow's tale, set in the early twentieth century, wove real historical figures into fictional lives, Shawn refused to publish a full-length review, calling the book "immoral."
Now, the musical adaptation returns with forceful, spectacular splendor at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre. And this second revival of the beloved story arrives on Broadway at just the right time.
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