Plácido Domingo, Julia Migenes-Johnson, and Ruggero Raimondi star in Rosi's acclaimed film of Bizet's Carmen. "Full-blooded, violent yet elegant...Rosi returns to the social and cultural milieu of Prosper Mérimée's original story, shooting Carmen in the towns, hills, and plains of Andalusia. This tough-minded man recreates the eternal Spanish themes of love, honor, and ritual death under the bright Mediterranean sun....Rosi makes clear one of the opera's harsher themes: bullfighting is not mere incidental color in Carmen, it's central to what the opera is about. The bull that is killed in Carmen is of course Don José....Rosi has shot his scenes with great freedom. All those familiar choruses of cigarette girls, soldiers, and gypsies, which can look falsely busy on the stage, are now fun to watch: Rosi goes all the way with his bent for authenticity, putting his extras to work in the street, around campfires, in the mountains and bullrings (and shows that) not everyone in Seville was concerned with these people and their overwrought love affairs..."-David Denby, New York