Viva Carmen – first-look review

It seems unlikely that many kids will warm to this visually sunny though tonally downbeat animated rendering of Bizet’s classic opera, Carmen, from French filmmaker Sébastian Laudenbach. Maybe there are some young’uns out there who will be enthused by learning that we can’t outrun our destiny, that the die has been cast and that the moment of our death has been preordained by some higher mystical order, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Fun times indeed…

While it may seem disingenuous to presuppose that an animated feature would naturally be aimed at a younger demographic, it does feel as if Laudenbach has made the film in that way, with many of the characters saddled with Disney-coded character profiles and the visuals primed to make a potentially staid and subtle story feel artificially dazzling and involving. The film is never quite able to shake off this strange identity crisis, and attempts made to modernise this certifiably old-fashion tale tend to err towards the sentimental.

Andalusia, the 1840s. It begins with the arrival of an aged, blind knife-sharpener who trundles into a tavern in Seville along with his trusty boy servant Salva (Milo Machado-Graner). When he presses a dull blades onto his spinning stone, the resulting sparks allow the sharpening soothsayer to see into the owner’s future. Rather than the general speculations you’d get from a palm reading or a crystal ball, this is a factual account of a destiny not yet written. So awful is the vision created by the knife of a seemingly friendly soldier, the old nomad returns his money and says that there’s nothing to see here.

Later on, Salva is enraptured by the siren song of beautiful gypsy Carmen as she coquettishly bathes in a river on the outskirts of the city, and though he is too young for a physical relationship, he is clearly in love. Salva later meets with street thief Belén (Soumaye Bocoum) with whom he has a bitter past relationship, yet when they discover that the old man’s envisaged the soldier killing Carmen, they band together in an impossible race to outflank destiny.

Laudenbach employs a similar, expressive animation style to the one used in his previous film, Chicken For Linda, which makes the film feel a little like you’re seeing the unrendered storyboards rather than the final, polished product. And it works well, channeling all of the physical detail or complex emotion you’d get from a more life-like digital style. Yet the story is a bit of a bust, while attempts at natty humour are weak and even the two tenacious heroes become a little grating after a while.