Content area
Full text
In the 1983 film Carmen, Carlos Saura creatively refashions Mérimée's novella and Bizet's opera into an exciting new rendering of the Carmen myth. The foundation of this film rests on Mérimée's narrative, which Saura admires for having the ability to convey a passionate love that still seems as fresh and expressive as it was in its own day (52). Since Saura views the plot modifications introduced in Bizet's opera as being a betrayal of Mérimée's novella (55), he ignores the opera's story line and concentrates instead on its music, which he describes as being very beautiful, truly inspired, and having moments that are both extraordinary and unforgettable (56). This double heritage of Mérimée's plot and Bizet's music provides the context within which Saura is able to introduce yet another art form-dancethrough the brilliant choreography of Antonio Gades.1
Upon its release, this film was critically hailed as a flamenco version of the Carmen story. It is important to keep in mind, however, that Saura does not simply recast the Carmen story in the form of a flamenco ballet. Rather, his film is an account of the daily activities of a dance troupe while in rehearsal for such a production.2 As such, the film consists of a frame (which shows the "real" lives of the dancers) and the embedded Carmen ballet (in which the dancers assume then· roles for the rehearsals). Reviewers of the film generally consider the modern frame story to be superfluous, distracting, and inferior to the dance sequences (e.g., Canby, Forbes, Stein, Bowers). If we examine Mérimée's novella, however, we see that the Carmen story originally did exist within a frame. Chapters one and two of the novella are narrated by a French archaeologist who, during his travels in Spain, is told the story of Carmen's life by her lover, don José, in the novella's third chapter. For Bizet's opera the librettists discarded this frame and freely adapted Mérimée's material concerning the love affair between Carmen and don José. In Saura's film the framing device reappears-albeit in a different form-thereby restoring the Carmen tale to its original status of an embedded story within a larger narrative. In this way Saura echoes the overall structure of Mérimée's novella in addition to using the basic plot...