Plantiana Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Megamind To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

chaos-rampant I'm not a fan of opera, I prefer a mobile eye, a shifting stage of appearances. So I expect those more versed than me to be able to mine this for more interesting insights in the story.I'm drawn here by two things primarily, looking for how they intersect. One is the dance, here wonderful flamenco. There's something silly when men dance it, but the women were a profound joy. There's none of the mannered formalism that you find in the European ballroom, here it's all stirred from explosive blood, urges push through and swirl on the dancing bodies. So this captivates purely for the expressive dance.The other is self-referential illumination on precisely this reality of the urges beneath the act. Dance isn't just bodies moving, though that's what we come to see. There's always something antecedent to it that animates the desire, in the original gypsy world of flamenco I suppose this was marginalization, poverty, lawlessness, it comes down to an anger, passion or pride that can't be reasoned and is let out in abstract shape. Here we have a flamenco staging about a flamenco staging of Carmen become animated by the same tumultuous passions in the opera. The inner Carmen story blurs in the outer Carmen which is about staging Carmen with a real passion, thus enlarging the stage to encompass the life that gives shape to it. So when Carmen and her rival in the troupe dance out their rivalry, or Carmen and her instructor dance out the seduction, we have a richer, more dangerous life than the opera or dance could afford.Saura had made another exercise prior to this and what looks like a few more, mixing dance with a story about the urges. It's smarter to notice than powerful to watch, because it's sparse and feels like a sketch. We see him perfect the co-mingling of story while figuring out the space.It all comes together with superb clarity in his Tango film.

vitachiel Carlos Saura's Carmen is a tense and surreal story of a director who falls in love with the lead actress he has chosen for his stage version of Bizet's Carmen. The acting performances are very good: Antonio Gades as the perfectionist, passionate and contemplative director Antonio and Laura del Sol as Carmen, the epitome of the femme fatale. Their liaison is radiant though doomed to fail.The foundation for the fatalistic way in which Antonio falls for Carmen lies in the fact that she perfectly fits the persona that he had in mind when searching for his lead actress. Saura cleverly uses the switching between reality, play and a combination of both, which adds to the surreal feel of the film. As a bonus we get an insider's look at the contagious Spanish fervor and joie de vivre. True craftsmanship.

Claudio Carvalho While rehearing Carmen of Bizet, the middle-aged choreographer Antonio (Antonio Gades) brings the sexy Carmen (Laura del Sol) to perform the lead role. Antonio falls in love for Carmen, who is an independent and seductive woman incapable to accept a possessive love. When Carmen has an affair with another dancer, Antonio is consumed by his jealousy like D. José in the original opera, entwining fiction with reality."Carmen" is another great movie of Carlos Saura's trilogy dedicated to the Flamenco dance. The dramatic love story is developed with the lives of the artists entwined with the characters they are rehearsing, and many times is not absolutely clear whether what is happening is reality (with the dancers) or fiction (of the play). Paco de Lucia is another attraction of this original version of the famous Bizet's opera, which is based on the novel of Prosper Mérimée. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Carmen"

bogyo-3 This is a wonderful film! Full of passion, music and drama. It follows the story of the opera of the same name. Even Carmen-haters will agree that this is a version that overcomes the boredom bred of familiarity and infuses new life into this overproduced work.The setting is a flamenco school in Spain, and the search is on for the star of a production of a flamenco Carmen. The director finds, and then falls in love with his new leading lady. The complications arise from there, from some unhappiness on the part of the best dancer in the troupe who feels she should be the star and not the newcomer, and from the storyline of the opera.The director of the film is the real-life director of one of the most famous dance schools in Spain, and the dancers, except for the character of Carmen, are members of the school.The dancing is exciting and dangerous, the story, though very familiar, attains fresh vigor in the new setting, and is altogether one of the best films of the eighties.