Word: carmen
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...recent a spate of opera films are making it possible to munch away on popcorn, Junior Mints or anything else while basking in some of the world's sophisticated music. The film adaptations of Mozart's "The Magic Flute", Puccini's "La Traviata" and now Bizet's "Carmen" return opera to its intended audience, the general public, more successfully than any low-budget opera company ever could...
...Francesco Rosi's "Bizet's Carmen" wonderfully demonstrates, adaptation is not quite the word to use when discussing opera films. Unlike in movie versions of novels and even plays, where directors often take great liberty in editing and rearranging the material, Rosi remains remarkably faithful to the staged production...
...JOINING OF two art forms is, nevertheless, tricky, because the task of fitting an opera into the framework of a film risks compromising or distorting the raw material itself. Fortunately, it's not so in Carmen. Here, the medium of film serves only to complement the staged production...
...corps of dancing peasant women. The film adds to the opera's sensuality without detracting from its heart. Save for the Flower Song scene, Rosi carefully avoids relying on facial close-ups and gestures which--though a necessary cinemagraphic technique--would have been absent from a stage version. In Carmen, the music's the thing...
...Carmen's latest incarnation, starring Spanish-born Tenor Placido Domingo and American Soprano Julia Migenes-Johnson, for once plays the opera straight...