Carmen [Blu-ray]

Simply astonishing
This has been something of an adventure for me amounting to almost a baptism of fire. Like many, I am very familiar with the story of Carmen as found in Bizet's well-known and popular opera and I thought that, as an introduction to an extended example of flamenco, this would be fairly straight-forward to follow. In addition, as the story is red-blooded to say the least, I thought it would be a natural partner for flamenco which I anticipated, would also be red-blooded.

In all of these expectations I was on the right lines. What I had not anticipated was the extraordinary degree to which this example of the flamenco art is able to extend the rawness of the emotional impact to an almost frightening degree.

Some background may be of help at this stage: Gades, as a young man, studied classical dance as well as all the Spanish popular dance idioms. This dual interest and skill enabled him, uniquely, to fuse together the two art forms of ballet and flamenco. He...

Carmen
The recent 2011 version of Carlos Saura's Carmen (Blu-ray) is a poor substitute for the 1983 original film version. The original version is not currently available at a reasonable price. Netflix only owns a few of the originals and one of those was cracked and a replacement had to be resent to us. The 1983 film is available on YouTube [...] (not downloadable in the US), but the screen resolution is not as good as the DVD.

This is a plea for someone to reissue the original 1983 film in which one can actually watch Antonio Gades, Paco de Lucia, Cristina Hoyos and Laura del Sol in a fantastic performance we have watched a number of times while other Netflix users wait. We would love to own a DVD of this excellent film.

The new stage performance is interesting but leaves one unlikely to watch it again. Carmen's relationship with her jailed husband before and after his release is very unclear in the new production. One is never sure who is fighting whom in several...

Dance version of the opera Carmen..
I'm afraid I was a bit disappointed with this version. It just didn't hold my interest, as did the Carlos Saura's version in flamenco dance. I wouldn't recommend this version, but I highly recommend the Carlos Saura's version of Carmen.

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