Ambition is hardly uncommon at Cannes, where hungry screenwriters, aspiring directors and actors with something to prove hit the Croisette ever on the make. The same could be said — doubly so — for the films themselves, though here those artistic aims tend to manifest as brooding narratives that grapple with Tough Questions, shaded in thematic and visual grays.
All of which makes Sébastien Laudenbach’s “Viva Carmen” such a vivid, unruly breath of fresh air. This animated gem is both a startlingly original act of adaptation and, more importantly, a welcome reminder that ambition can also be fun.
That spirit courses through every frame of a 90-minute adventure, while admiration for the filmmaker’s feat lingers well beyond the credits. By the festival’s end, it’s hard to name another film so tonally coherent, so fully realized. Impeccable in its use of color, design, story, music and theme, “Viva Carmen” impresses all the more for how fluidly those elements interact, layering into something almost symphonic.
Let’s start with the plot. You likely know Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera — itself adapted from a novella by Prosper Mérimée — charting the doomed affair between a fiercely independent woman and the volatile soldier who destroys her. Laudenbach plays with that familiarity, opening in the same bustling Seville square where Carmen first teases Don José, but shifting the vantage point to a chorus of street urchins and never straying far from their perspective. The tragedy unfolds through their eyes, refracted with a childlike bemusement that brightens the palette. Think “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” by way of “Oliver!” — or a Boys’ Own adventure torn from the pages of Stevenson or Twain.
That boy is Salva (voiced by Milo Machado-Graner, of “Anatomy of a Fall”) — an orphan-turned-apprentice who rolls into Seville one sweltering morning to sharpen knives in the town square. Though blind, his master possesses another kind of sight, glimpsing each blade’s future in the sparks they throw — and what do you suppose he sees when Don José offers his up for a tune-up?
Salva and the other street kids are no strangers to death — how else do children end up alone? What’s striking is that Laudenbach and co-writer Santiago Otheguy seize on that thread, weaving it into a broader, career-spanning meditation on childhood under duress. In that sense, “Viva Carmen” plays like a natural continuation of the bittersweet exploration of grief and resilience that so vividly animated Laudenbach and Chiara Malta’s 2023 project “Chicken for Linda!”
Only here, that death is foretold, giving Salva and his gang a chance to stop it by getting rid of the blade before it ever reaches Carmen (voiced by singer and actor Camélia Jordana). This “no fate but what we make” idea doesn’t just drive the story — it also reflects the act of adaptation itself. How far can a filmmaker go in changing a classic? When to break the rules, and when to follow them? And most of all: Why does Carmen have to die?
Laudenbach echoes those questions through his signature design style, where pools of color break free from their outlines, each image charged with the tension of containment. The palette glows in fuchsia and azure, with a sharp, vivid green reserved for Carmen’s eyes alone. His use of contrast is just as striking, evoking the harsh Spanish sun as it cuts across Seville’s buildings, slicing every frame into bold diagonals of light and shadow.
The film’s music follows suit, mirroring that sketch-like visual approach by offering only fleeting fragments of Bizet. In place of grand orchestration, composers Amine Bouhafa and Isabelle Laudenbach refract familiar arias through pipes and strings, evoking the clatter and rhythm of street life — as if enough wagons over cobblestones might, in time, assemble their own orchestra.
Above all, the film is simply fun — spinning its ideas of predestination and powerlessness into a genuine adventure, packed with lively set pieces and driven by a constant sense of motion.
For all their play with the strictures of adaptation, the filmmakers understand that some lines hold, and that opera cannot stray too far from tragedy. The children here — as in all of Laudenbach’s work — arrive at a similar truth. Death may be fixed, but grief is fluid: another shade in a wider palette, something to be shaped, contrasted and woven into art.
