U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha

Riveting update of George Bizet's "Carmen."

Mr. Hazlewood’s strategy also draws attention to the lack of psychological detail in the central love triangle, which isn’t good. But the music still pierces, the blood still flows, and the overall conception is so original that even when the movie falters in the moment, it dazzles in the memory.

This was basically the best idea ever. The setting brims over with the same wicked froth of danger, exoticism, and passion that 19th-century Seville must have had before it got stylized into oblivion.

It's vivid evidence that great music and stories transcend time and place.

The film is never dull and often rousing, but this is essentially a conventional version of a classic opera--the attempt to transform it into a critique of macho hubris comes off as an afterthought, and the poverty is just a backdrop.

This version of Georges Bizet's frequently reinterpreted "Carmen" is spoken and sung in the click-punctuated African lingo of Xhosa and adapted to fit yarn's shift south, with a semi-cinema verite style cleverly disguising the artifice of the work's legit origins.

Brilliantly sung by an extremely talented lyric theater company in Cape Town called Dimpho Di Kopane. Whether this all works will be a matter of opinion -- mine is that it does not -- but the experiment is fascinating.