U-Carmen: Bizarre Bizet adaptation works, off and on

Reviewer: James Van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): **½ (add a star if you're an opera buff)

Not being an opera fan, I have seen Carmen maybe twice in my life (and the ballet version a couple more times), so I am not the best judge of this South African film version, in which the actors speak and sing (or are perhaps dubbed) in Xhosa. The time is now and the place a South African township where the women labor in that ubiquitous cigarette factory and the men are either townspeople or police. Some of this works quite well, and the transfer from Spain to South Africa is a perfectly good one.

In the role of Carmen, Pauline Malefane is a force of nature. Nothing and nobody else comes near her level, and she is worth the watch of this sometimes stumbling film. Part of the stumbling, I think, is simply due to the primitive (some might say clunky) story, which has been the case in every version I have seen. We must accept on faith that our hero (here called Jongikhaya) succumbs to the charms of Carmen. The car ride in which much of the succumbing occurs does not begin to fill the distance between what the story insists is happening and what we viewers actually witness. Nor does the ending pack the punch it might because so much of what has gone before seems pre-ordained. We go along with it, or not. (And I mostly did not.) The music, too, seems sometimes as undercooked as the drama is overcooked, although the blending of Bizet's music with South African rhythms and sounds made for an interesting and mostly workable combination.

The director/adaptor Mark Dornford-May made another film the following year called Son of Man, in which Jesus appears in present day South Africa and Ms. Malefane has the role of his mom. I hope we'll get the opportunity to see this one some day, if only to discover what else this director and his star can accomplish.