Granted that opera on film is an impossibility, Francesco Rosi’s Carmen (or Bizet’s Carmen, as it has to be billed amid a plethora of Carmens) is the best try yet, Bergman’s Magic Flute, the previous record-holder, having taken a few too many liberties. Rosi’s only major liberty is really a compulsion: Something has to be invented for the overture, and here we get a highly dramatic final phase of a bullfight, as a dazed bull, profusely bleeding from the banderillas turning him into a bovine St. Sebastian, is dispatched by Escamillo. The sequence fits the spirit of the work, even if it isn’t the correct metaphor for Don José and Carmen. For that, the beast would have had to kill the matador.
Even when it tries for verismo, opera is still basically stylized; whereas film, however bent on formalization, cannot quite escape verisimilitude, possession by reality. Problems proliferate, from the difficulty of making singing-induced movements of the mouth fit in with the right emotional expressions, all the way to the slightly uncanny, canned quality of on-screen sound. And film’s demands on the performers are insuperable. Actors dubbed by singers yield audio-visual schizophrenia; singers doing their own acting, as here, are ordinary athletes corralled into a decathlon. A given era can perhaps boast just enough opera singers who can sing, act, and look right to outfit one international production, but even if they could all be rounded up, how hold on to them for the considerable duration of shooting a film?
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