A young woman named Carmen is cast for the lead role in a dance production of the same name, and proceeds to prove her rightness for the role off stage as well as on. That old life-imitating-art gambit, or more accurately, that old art-imitating-life-imitating-art gambit, which has been a creaky contrivance since at least A Double Life, is the more bothersome here because of the many compensating virtues: good-looking faces and bodies, most notably those of Antonio Gades; good rehearsal ambience, including some uproarious birthday-party antics; good dancing, particularly the fully choreographed fight scene. (Apart from that one number, we get little idea what the finished product -- some sort of combination opera-ballet -- is supposed to look like: the thing never survives rehearsals, for reasons anyone familiar with the Mérimée tale will soon be able to guess.) The prior collaboration between director Carlos Saura and dancer Antonio Gades, Blood Wedding, had all of that, too. All of that and -- as they say in diet-drink advertisements -- less. What has been added on to the skin-and-bones of the earlier collaboration becomes a glaring example of the more-is-less principle. We are not told enough about the characters to care about them as anything other than dancers (which, as Blood Wedding showed, is quite enough), and all the backstage drama which keeps them from being merely that, is merely annoying. With Laura del Sol and Paco de Lucia. (1982) — Duncan Shepherd
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