Chances are you’ve encountered the story before.
A young man falls in love with a mysterious woman who upends his life and leads them both to tragedy. The French novella Carmen has been directly and indirectly adapted so often that it’s practically woven into the collective cultural fabric. Rita Hayworth famously tackled the role of the fiery female, and Dorothy Dandridge became the first Black woman to receive a Best Actress Oscar nomination for the all-Black adaptation Carmen Jones. Millennials may fondly remember the MTV film Carmen: A Hip Hopera, starring Beyoncé Knowles and Mekhi Phifer as the star-crossed lovers.
Benjamin Millepied is the latest director to tackle the well-trodden and influential material. Carmen, his directorial feature debut, is built around the titular character played by Melissa Barrera. Carmen lives on the edge of the U.S.-Mexico border, seeking refuge in California after her mother’s brutal murder. Her path crosses with Aidan (Paul Mescal), an aimless ex-Marine suffering from PTSD, during an illegal late-night border crossing. When Paul defends her from a trigger-happy fellow border patrol guard and accidentally kills him, Aidan and Carmen go on the run together. On their journey to Los Angeles, they discover they may be linked by more than coincidence.
Older than any version of Carmen, fate greatly informs Millepied’s interpretation. He builds his film around moments that defy explanation and blur the line between fantasy and reality. Two fires, for instance, will burn simultaneously in two different places, one experienced by a devastated Carmen, the other by a shell-shocked Aidan. Are they just an oddly-timed pair of events? Or do they mean more? For Millepied, the mystery is the point.
“We established the language early on in the first few minutes of the film,” Millepied said in an interview with Geek Vibes Nation. “We create atmosphere and leave [room for] mystery. People will find different ways to read [the film], and it’s good that way.”
Millepied sees beauty in the ambiguity and willingness to trust where it leads. “Reality feels like it’s full of signs. It’s full of coincidences that aren’t coincidences. If you pay attention, life serves you things on a plate that are meant for you to live and grow.”
In Carmen, life serves Aidan and Carmen each other, granting them both an unexpected but affirming love even in the most dire of situations. In Millepied’s film, both characters are defined by what’s just out of reach. Carmen is “filled with freedom, integrity, and fearlessness,” but she’s often threatened by men who see her as a possession or sub-human, in the case of the border patrol agents. She rarely, if ever, receives love and tenderness that isn’t transactional. Paul also struggles genuinely connecting with people because of his “extraordinary level of loneliness” after returning from combat.
For Millepied, destiny plays a central role in bringing them together. “I think [Aidan] is someone who deserved to love and be loved and didn’t have that,” he explains. “Carmen gives him that, something he’s never had. She brings him something that changes his heart. And Aidan gives her something that she’s never had either because men have always been a threat in her life.”
Millepied worked closely, but not rigidly, to help Melissa Barrera and Paul Mescal access the intensity of Carmen and Aidan’s connection. “They were outstanding,” Millepied said about his leads. “They both informed the story a lot. We talked all the time and played a lot with the scenes. We were very playful in how we shot their performances.”
He continued, “I tried to inspire them, from take to take, to find things that would create tension. Sometimes I gave them opposing emotions to help create tension. I wanted so much tension and the emotions underneath the surface in the film.”
A famed choreographer on stage and of film, Millepied leaned on the similarities between analyzing dance and cinema when directing Carmen. When stepping behind the camera and choosing how audiences would see his vision, he found the experience both constricting and liberating.
“There are so many options,” he explains. “You can decide to go into a tiny detail or a wide shot over the shoulder from the back. But it is liberating to say, ‘Oh my God, this is exactly what this scene needs,’ and stick to and shoot it just like that. It’s liberating to have so many options to create atmosphere and emotion.”
Ultimately, Millepied wants audiences to take away a sense of liberation from Carmen, not to be restricted by one way of interpreting what’s on the screen. He cares more for viewers fully immersing themselves in the emotions the film may well up inside, just as Carmen is swept up in an enchanting desert dance.
“[Carmen] should be experienced like a dance, a complete work of art, where music, story, and movement come together at once to carry people with it. It needs to be taken as a whole, single experience. The more you let yourself go, the better.”
Carmen will begin playing in select theaters beginning April 21, 2023 courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. A national release will follow in the coming weeks.
A late-stage millennial lover of most things related to pop culture. Becomes irrationally irritated by Oscar predictions that don’t come true.