Legendary opera Carmen reimagined in Australia’s outback
A new film starring Melissa Barrera and Paul Mescal reimagines the story of Carmen through dance, with the beauty of the Australian outback as its backdrop.
Melissa Barrera works best under pressure. Which is just as well, because to nail the final set piece of Carmen, the directorial debut of choreographer Benjamin Millepied of Black Swan fame, scored with a dreamlike symphony by Succession’s composer Nicholas Britell and co-starring normal person Paul Mescal, she had just half an hour.
Half an hour of golden syrupy light, as the sun dipped below the horizon at Broken Hill, to leap into Mescal’s arms in rhythmic oblivion at the conclusion of a dance sequence that has to sell passion, longing and despair all at the same time. “There were also flies,” Barrera points out. “Lots of flies. Annoying flies that just want to get into every orifice of your face.” Ah, cinema!
The Australian outback was never supposed to be the location for Millepied’s reimagining of the legendary opera Carmen, but fate – and a global pandemic – intervened. The former director of the Paris Opera Ballet had been working on his vision for a retooled interpretation of Georges Bizet’s tragic tale of lust and woe for almost a decade. Millepied’s idea was to take the character of Carmen, and her qualities of fearlessness and integrity – “the fire inside of her”, sums up Barrera – and bring the story into the 21st century. “Not just a woman who can’t be loved or love,” Millepied stresses, “which I think is what’s wrong with the Bizet [version].”
The plot of Millepied’s reimagining is simple but propulsive: Carmen (Barrera) is in danger. She crosses the border from Mexico to America where she encounters Aidan (Mescal), a former soldier, who spares her life. Their connection is swift and visceral. These kinds of stories live or die by the chemistry of their leads, something that Barrera and Mescal convey with a single charged glance – though it’s becoming increasingly clear that Mescal has chemistry with everyone and everything – and it is fuelled not by words but through dance. “We ended up with a film with not a lot of dialogue, and a lot of it is told in movement,” Millepied says. And yet, it was crucial to the director that “somehow music and dance wouldn’t take you out of it, that it felt real”.
The film nearly went into production – Millepied had scouted locations in Mexico – and then the novel coronavirus rained on its parade. The world went into lockdown. We baked sourdough loaves and banana bread. Millepied relocated from Los Angeles to Sydney with his wife, Natalie Portman, and their children to prepare for Portman’s role in Thor: Love & Thunder. A glimmer of hope danced before him. What if Carmen could be made in Australia? Mexico was recreated in Goulburn and Broken Hill; Sydney became LA.
“It worked out very well,” Millepied says. “We added a few palm trees on the street, that’s about it.” All told, the Millepied-Portmans lived in Sydney for a year and loved their time in Australia so much that they are returning next month for a family holiday. “My son today was like, he still wants us to move back,” Millepied smiles.
Barrera first met with Millepied in 2018. (“They want a Mexican Carmen?” Barrera remembers thinking. “Hi, who else? Me!”) The actor had just landed in LA from her native Mexico; she was yet to book her starring roles in In The Heightsand the rebooted Scream franchise.
“I’m literally no one and this director is really looking to me and asking my thoughts and taking my notes. It just was incredibly collaborative”
“I needed a Mexican woman who could sing and dance and act and who could really embody the character,” Millepied shares. “And she was all that.” Barrera channelled Carmen’s boldness in an early meeting when, unprompted, she offered some thoughts on the Carmen script, then mostly in English.
“I have a very big mouth. I feel like I’m very honest and I’m very blunt about a lot of things,” she begins. “They had all the characters in Mexico speaking in English. And I was like, ‘that makes no sense.’”
Millepied, who is French, agreed and made changes to the screenplay. “He cared a lot about my opinion and I felt heard and respected, which felt new,” Barrera admits. “I’m literally no one and this director is really looking to me and asking my thoughts and taking my notes. It just was incredibly collaborative from the beginning.”
Finding Carmen’s Aidan – a soldier like the desperate Don José of Bizet’s opera; there all resemblance ends – took longer. Several actors, including Jamie Dornan, signed on and then dropped out. “I needed someone who really was a man, and not a pretty boy,” explains Millepied. Someone who could marry the physicality of an ex-Marine with the fluidity and grace of dance.
In Carmen, Mescal is those things and more: exuding strength and sensitivity with every movement. (And yes, you better believe he can dance.) “I, like the rest of the world, watched Normal People and fell in love with him,” says Barrera. “When it was him, I was like, ‘Oh, this is why it’s taken so long. We were waiting for him.’”
The pair didn’t meet until rehearsals began in Australia in December 2020. Trust, chemistry and camaraderie were built over daily FaceTimes while the pair were in hotel quarantine. “We would lose our shit together and panic and also just chat, because we were both going crazy,” Barrera recalls.
But the real work began in the dance studio: neither Mescal nor Barrera are trained dancers. Millepied has experience in this field; he choreographed Portman in Black Swan. “That’s just part of my skill, to make actors look really credible,” he smiles.
Occasionally, there’s a little camera angle trickery involved, but mostly it’s about building confidence in their bodies and creating an environment in which they feel truly free to move, Millepied says, praising Barrera for her “insane ability” and hard work. “Sometimes, he’d do things, and I wouldn’t be able to do it,” Barrera remembers. “He’d be like, ‘You can do it.’ And then I’d just have to. He would trust me more than I would trust myself.”
There was trust between scene partners Barrera and Mescal too, bolstered by the “trial and error” of rehearsals. “We’re both very gung-ho,” Barrera says. “We had so much time spent in the dance room that we learned how the other moves.”
The best sequence of the film is a soulful ballet lit only by a full Broken Hill moon, in which Barrera and Mescal’s hands never separate as they arch and spin, their connection impossible to sever. Two bodies moving as one. “You can tell an entire story with a dance,” says Barrera. “And the beauty of it not being spoken is that it’s universal.”
Carmen is showing as part of the Sydney Film Festival in June, and is in cinemas July 13.
This article appears in the June issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.