"U-CARMEN e-KHYELITSHA" is an extremely unusual version of the opera Carmen set in a squalid shanty-town "Township", Khyelitsha, near Capetown, South Africa --and sung entirely by African singers in the "click language", Khosa! This black Carmen is a light year beyond the light brown "Carmen Jones" of 1954 which starred Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge and seemed so saucy and racy at the time. For one thing, Pauline Malefane (Carmen) is not a slender Hollywood mannekin type like Dandridge was, and Andile Tshoni ("Don Jose") is not a ridiculously handsome piece of brown male sculpture as was Harry Belafonte back then. Both are hefty people you wouldn't want to get into a barroom brawl with, and both can sing the hell out of Carmen. If Dandridge and Belafonte were simply ebony versions of your standard Hollywood beautiful people, these Carmen protagonists look more like heavy set black angels from Hell, as do most all the performers in this cast. Of course, what is at stake here is a very different set of physical beauty standards. The Xhosa aesthetic clearly does not place a high value on slenderness and these massive actors must obviously conform to local standards of "good-lookingness". But what is really important is that they can not only sing, and dance (African style), but they can also act! -- such that, after a while the viewer is completely swept up into the drama with many stretches of unsung dialogue in the surprisingly soft-sounding, melodious Xhosa language. The entire setting of this South African Carmen is in the gritty township, a fancy name for a slum, which calls for certain modifications. There is indeed a cigarette factory in the area, but the smugglers are now smuggling dope in from the nearby seashore. Jose is the local chief of police, quite brutal, and rides around in a jeep, whereas Don Escamillo the toreador is now "Nkomo", a local singing star who is actually set to sing excerpts from the opera at a local music hall. The charged dramatic exchanges between this Carmen and this Jose, especially at the end, are as gripping or more so, than any I have ever seen on any opera stage. In fact, the one previous screen Carmen this film does have something in common with, for sheer drama and interweaving of real life with the Carmen story, is Carlos Saura's all Flamenco Carmen of 1983. Mark Dornford-May is the director of this heavyweight, hypnotic, exotic "Carmen" which could turn out to be a surprise hit wherever it is released. Black Carmen walked off with the golden bear at Berlin 2005 but, strangely, possibly because there was no promotion budget, did not get much further than Berlin.
Review of U-Carmen eKhayelitsha
