Summary
During a failed bank raid, a terrorist named Carmen is seduced by a security guard, Joseph.
To escape arrest, Carmen appears to submit to her obsessed lover and the two take refuge
in a seaside apartment. However, Carmen remains committed to her terrorist activities
and plans a kidnapping, whilst pretending to film a documentary for her uncle, once a
great film director. How will Joseph react to Carmen’s apparent indifference to
their relationship?
Review
In this film, the eternally controversial film director Jean-Luc Godard offers his distinctive
treatment of the familiar Carmen story, best known as the famous Bizet opera. Although
one of Bizet’s well-known airs does actually make it into the film (albeit in a somewhat
tongue-in-cheek manner), Godard sets his film to the music of Beethoven, not Bizet.
This is one of many surprising Godardesque tricks which makes this such a bizarre, surprising
and sometimes unsettling film.
Perhaps the most surprising thing of all is how accessible the film is. During the
1980s, Godard’s cinema showed a progression towards the bewilderingly complex, defying
every convention as far as possible. Frequently, he dispensed with any notion of
the narrative form, relying on photographic imagery and sound trickery to construct -
not a story - but an alternative form of expression. It is this unrelenting striving
for originality in film-making that contributed to the director’s increasing ostracism
from mainstream cinema. Prénom Carmen stands out as possibly the one
film during this period where Godard was able to appeal to a wider audience.
This is a film that shines with the director’s wry, cynical humour, and carries more than
an echo of the director’s glory days of the 1960s. Strangely, it is also a very
human film. Joesph’s obsessive love for Carmen is very subtly and convincing portrayed.
Godard even gets to play a warm caricature of himself as Carmen’s burnt out uncle, a touching
cameo performance which reveals a great deal of how the director saw himself at the time.
© James Travers 2001
|
