Prénom Carmen (1983) - film review

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?

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

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