Film Review
Prosper Mérimée's famous tale of a Spanish gypsy girl and the
man she drove wild with desire has inspired one great opera and numerous
film adaptations, so it is easy to be dismissive of screen interpretations,
such as Christian-Jaque's mid-1940s crowdpleaser, that merely turns it into
a tawdry entertainment for the masses. On a roll after the success
of the two prestigious films he made for Continental -
L'Assassinat du père
Noël (1941) and
La Symphonie fantastique
(1942) - Christian-Jaque allowed himself to be carried away by a populist
wave that prevented him from being a serious film director - of the calibre
of say Julien Duvivier or Marcel Carné - but ensured future box office
success for well over a decade.
Carmen pretty well sealed C-J's
fate, which is ironic given that predestination is one of the key themes
of the story.
With his native France under Nazi occupation, Christian-Jaque welcomed the
opportunity to make the film abroad. The exteriors were shot in Spain,
the interiors at Scalera Studios in Rome, and the result is an expensive
looking production that was bound to attract large audiences. It is
a sign of how far the director's career had come (only five years previously he
had been making fairly cheap comedies with Fernandel) that he now had a blockbuster
budget and was working with two of the biggest French movie stars of the
time, Viviane Romance and Jean Marais. Ludovic Halévy and Henri
Meilhac's libretto was developed into the film's screenplay by Charles Spaak,
one of France's most sought after screenwriters, and all the music was naturally
purloined from Georges Bizet's famous opera. Christian-Jaque's
Carmen
is a vivid dramatic take on the opera that we are all familiar with, perhaps
a tad overblown in places but with a few idiosyncratic tweaks to the narrative
to make it appear fresher than it might have done.
The casting of Viviane Romance in the lead role is hardly a surprise - she
made a career playing sultry man-eaters like Carmen, and she could hardly
play anything else with her alluring good looks and magnetic personality.
To coin a phrase, she
was the devil made flesh. Romance's
seductive, smouldering presence alone makes the film worth watching, although
her talents (along with those of the rest of the cast) are mostly wasted
on a script that is barely more sophisticated than that of your average Christmas
pantomime. Jean Marais looks as if he was cast more because he could
service the film's action scenes than for his suitability for the role of
Don José - he is excellent in the former, a tad disappointing in the
latter, his transition from a meek model solider to a murdering, love-obsessed
maniac looking too forced and theatrical to be convincing on screen.
Clearly a student of the Robert Newton school of acting, Lucien Coëdel
has great fun playing the cut-throat bandit Garcia, although the eye-patch
and his slightly overdone histrionics (which include an irritating laugh)
betray what looks like a desperate yearning to play Long John Silver in pantomime.
Marguerite Moreno is no less batty as a film noir-flavoured fortune teller,
and Bernard Blier supplies further unintentional hilarity, 'monking about'
in a habit for all it is worth. Considering how much comic potential
the film has, it's surprising Christian-Jaque didn't go the whole hog and
turn it into the bawdiest of farces - that would at least have made it more
interesting. It's so tempting to think of the film as
Carry on Carmen...
Success now having clearly gone to his head, Christian-Jaque has a go at
playing the great auteur, imitating his directing heroes with limited success.
A dramatic horseback raid on a stagecoach which might easily have been directed
by John Ford is one of the film's more successful bravura sequences, far more convincing
than the badly edited together bullfight scene near the end of the film.
There are a few sporadic moments of brilliance which provide a glimpse of
what a truly great cineaste Christian-Jaque might have been had he not succumbed
to the hollow rewards of mainstream success. In one scene a camera
peeks up through a glass table on which an utterly creepy Marguerite Moreno
places the cards foretelling poor Viviane's future. This is later topped
by a weird subjective camera shot showing the point-of-view of a mortally
wounded man as he staggers and drops to the ground.
Inspired touches such as these are welcome but they are too few and far between
to make
Carmen appear anything more than a crowdpleaser punching half-heartedly
above its weight. To his credit Christian-Jaque does a fine job of
keeping up the tempo throughout, so there isn't so much as a hint of a longueur.
Helped by his cinematographer Ubaldo Arata, C-J succeeds in wrapping the
familiar story in a cloak of dark romanticism that tends towards poetic realism
in its gloomy closing passages. Anticipating the director's subsequent
great swashbuckler -
Fanfan la
Tulipe (1952) -
Carmen makes an entertaining, well-paced romp,
but it clearly lacks the sustained artistry of the far superior films that
Christian-Jaque put his signature to around this time -
Boule de suif (1945) and
Un revenant (1946).
© James Travers 2016
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Christian-Jaque film:
Sortilèges (1945)
Film Synopsis
Seville, Spain. As soon as Don José, a naive young lieutenant,
sets eyes on the dark haired beauty Carmen he makes himself her slave, like
so many men before him. After the gypsy girl has been arrested for
brawling with another woman in the cigarette factory where she works, Don
José is tasked with taking her to prison, but she tricks him and escapes.
The lieutenant's reward is demotion and a short spell in prison. Realising
that Don José may be useful to her, Carmen contrives his escape and
offers herself to him, in exchange for his turning a blind eye when her friends,
a gang of outlaws, enter the city to raid the cigarette factory. Carmen's
present lover, another solider, is shocked to find her in the company of
his disgraced subordinate and a duel ensues, with Don José the victor.
Now that desertion is his only option, Don José flees to join Carmen's
band of outlaws in the mountains, and finds he has a rival in the bloodthirsty
Garcia-le-Borgne. After the latter's arrest, Don José takes
his place but shows his victims more leniency than Garcia. Narrowly
escaping execution, Le-Borgne returns to the gang but is killed by Don José
in a fight when the latter discovers his rival has a greater claim to Carmen
than he does. Having grown sick of his life as an outlaw, Don José
tells Carmen he intends making a fresh start with her in Mexico, but she
has fallen out of love with him and flees to the town of Ronda. Here,
Carmen loses her heart to the handsome toreador Lucas and watches on in horror
as he is mortally wounded in a bullfight. Unable to let Carmen go,
Don José takes her to a remote spot and offers her once last chance
- to begin a new life with him or die...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.