Rosi's film version of Bizet's opera is fresh, open, filled with surprise. Julia Migenes-Johnson, Plàcido Domingo, and Ruggero Raimondi star, and prove themselves to be extraordinary cinematic presences. There is nothing of the femme fatale in Migenes-Johnson's Carmen; rather, in both her posture and her full-blooded voice, she personifies the taunting twin spirits of the South-freedom and death-that Rosi has explored in every film. Domingo offers a moving and true portrayal of the doomed Don José, driven like a sorrowful bull by desire he barely comprehends. Rather than use cinema to make the opera more intimate, Rosi does the opposite: he has shot the film in the towns, plains, and hills of Andalusia, frequently abandoning the heroes to foreground the peasant faces and movement he loves, and letting the music resonate of its own accord with that business. In a film of distance, sentiment is banished, and a well-loved, and well-worn, opera is thus revived. "The definitive screen adaptation" (Vincent Canby, NY Times).