117 min | R | April 21, 2023 | Sony Pictures Classics
A young woman flees Mexico after violence claims her mother and crosses the border on foot. A discharged Marine working night patrol abandons his post to run with her. Benjamin Millepied wants the desert to sing, but he forgets to give it words.
Carmen reimagines Prosper Mérimée’s novella as a fugitive love story set against the Mexico-Texas border. Carmen crosses into America after her mother is murdered. Aidan, a Marine reservist haunted by his deployment, mans a vigilante night patrol and chooses to protect her instead of detaining her. The two run together toward Los Angeles and a nightclub run by Carmen’s late mother’s friend. Benjamin Millepied stages this as a musical of bodies in motion, and the film cares more about how grief moves through a person than about plot.
Melissa Barrera plays Carmen as a woman who carries her mother’s defiance in her spine. She dances with a coiled fury that reads as both seduction and survival. Paul Mescal plays Aidan with a stillness that breaks open in the dance sequences. He is a man trying to outrun his own violence, and Mescal lets the tremor show before the body does. Rossy de Palma plays Masilda, the nightclub owner, as a fierce keeper of the dead, and she anchors the film’s third act with a gravity the leads cannot always supply.
Millepied directs his first feature as a choreographer first and a storyteller second. He scripts the film with Alexander Dinelaris and Loïc Barrère, and the screenplay strands the dancing in a narrative that never settles its stakes. Nicholas Britell scores the film with flamenco rhythms that bleed into orchestral swells, and the music does the emotional work the dialogue refuses to do. The cinematography drowns the desert in saturated reds and blacks until the border becomes a dreamscape rather than a place. Every frame is composed for beauty, and the beauty eventually flattens into spectacle.
This is a film built by a man who knows exactly how to move a body and barely how to write a scene. The dance sequences land. The connective tissue between them goes slack. Barrera and Mescal generate real heat, and the film keeps cutting away from it to chase another stylized image. Carmen reaches for myth and lands on mood, and a mood is not a story.