U-Carmen iKhayelitsha

When this film was first on circuit, having won the 2005 Golden Bear award in Berlin, I had high hopes of being able to see it in a cinema; however, it seemed to miss most of the main venues and dropped into insignificance for most of us. I remember being present at Cape Town International Airport to meet someone off a flight when the director and cast flew back from receiving their awards in Germany and seeing how the entire concourse was taken up with their reception committee which was anything but quiet. So imagine my delight when I was able to find a copy of the DVD over the weekend! I immediately bought it and retired to watch the result.

Despite being an opera-fan for many years, I have only seen Carmen once, and that evening turned out to be something of a mission since the original opera has five acts; in sheer length and in its ability to turn the most comfortable theatre seat into an agony of shifting this way and that in order to stop one’s legs going to sleep it is only rivalled by several of the Wagner operas. Musically it does not rate with me as one of the greats since its many good melodies are interspersed with a great deal of operatic padding and stage-business and its orchestration definitely fits into the ‘light music’ category. No doubt in his time Bizet was popular, being accessible to most of the public, but a great composer he is not. When compared with Verdi, Puccini, Ponchielli, Saint-Saens (all of whom wrote at a similar time), his music is pleasantly singable but not particularly deep.

It was interesting to see how Carmen would translate into a modern idiom and especially into Xhosa and move itself from a romantic Spain of 1875 to a squalid Khayelitsha of the present. Of course, Romeo and Juliet was successfully moved from the middle ages to modern New York in West Side Story, and Carmen has been moved before with reasonable success as in Carmen Jones, again set in America. However, the Americans are not known for the sheer exuberance and amazing voices of our local black Africans, and so I was eager to see how this idea worked.

Apart from the fact that the natural noise of the streets is often allowed to drown out the score so that Bizet’s music becomes no more than a faint background, the singing is extremely good. It is a real thrill to know that there is such talent hidden away in the townships of this country and a great pity that we don’t see and hear more of it. Carmen comes across as a rather reclusive girl, hidden away in her cigarette factory, and does not really come to life as the temptress/animal that Callas made her until the very end of the opera. The famous Habanera is very low-key and, in my mind, could have been made a great deal more of, as also the gypsy dance on the table in the tavern, but the card song is brilliantly translated into a visit to the witch-doctor, and the very dramatic ending brings tears to the eyes.

The singing, as you can expect, is remarkably good and true to the original score, although, with the exception of Jongi (the soldier, Don Jose, with whom the original Carmen falls in love) and the girl from the country (Michaela), the soloists seem to have difficulty in sustaining the long top notes and some of these were slightly flat. The part of Escamillo (the bull-fighter, but in this version the singer) is all but written out and appears on only two occasions and is then little more than incidental to the actual plot. However, the bouquets really go to Jongi and Michaela, both of whom have wonderful voices that have depth, pitch and a strength capable of holding its own in any opera-house.

The original plot is a mixture of love, lust, betrayal, revenge, and death and this comes over well in U-Carmen, except for the fact that Carmen’s eventual allegiance to Escamillo and the jealousy that this causes in Jongi is not present in this version. It leaves the watcher wondering why Carmen suddenly appears to fall out of love with Jongi at the end of the opera, and therefore why he kills her. I kept on wondering through the DVD what European audiences must have thought of these somewhat overweight protagonists as they strutted their stuff about busy Khayelitsha. Carmen manages to zip herself into some amazingly tight outfits (no small task, if you’ll pardon the pun) and Jongi looks, throughout the opera, like a small turnip about to burst out of his uniform. The ageing Escamillo figure entirely lacks the aplomb and lustre of the star in the original.

Acted out against the backdrop of a very real and lively Khayelitsha with revenge being replaced by criminality and a yearning for money taking the place of lust, it is an extremely well made film and the translation from the original French into Xhosa is little short of brilliant. The truncation of the original opera tends to reduce it rather to a musical comedy in which normal scenes suddenly burst forth into music and the commonplace suddenly becomes the operatic drama, is not for everyone. However, in the context it works and one is actually left wondering whether the original or its translation is the better theatre. The only pity in my mind is that some of the better music gets thrown out, causing the plot to be a little hard to follow, and the end result to be a little ‘bitty’ and raising a number of questions in the mind of the watcher.