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DVD / video | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Karmen Geļ |
Editors: | Ramaka, Joseph Gaļ N'diaye, El Hadj |
Year: | 2005 |
Language: | French |
City of publisher: | New York |
Publisher: | Kino Video |
Geographic term: | Senegal |
Subjects: | women interpersonal relations homosexuality musicals (form) feature films (form) videos (form) |
External link: | http://youtu.be/xWyOzZBAScY |
Abstract: | Bizet's opera Carmen receives a bold reworking in this movie musical, the first produced in sub-Saharan Africa. The film fuses the rhythms of West African dance to the melody of contemporary Senegalese pop music and the vanguard jazz of David Murray's World Saxophone Quartet. Jailed in a women's prison on notorious Goree Island, Karmen turns the table on her captors by seducing beautiful warden Angelique and escaping into the Dakar underworld. At the society wedding of prominent police corporal Lamine, Karmen denounces the rich guests, brawls with the bride and beds the groom. The love triangle between Karmen, Angelique and Lamine evolves into a more complex geometry that soon includes a smuggler and a charismatic singer (Senegalese pop star El Hadj N'diaye). Though Karmen's insatiable lust for life and disgust with hypocrisy sow the seeds of her operatic downfall, unlike Bizet's opportunistic seductress, this modern African Carmen is 'an incongruously independent woman finally undone by her own aphrodisiac magnetism'. [Abstract reproduced from video] |