Sexual desire and desperation are the propelling forces in this gorgeous, erotically explicit reworking of Bizet's Carmen, which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. Godard and scriptwriter Miéville retained the themes of the opera-sex, death, jealousy, the fear of women-but jettisoned almost everything else. Carmen X (Maruschka Detmers) visits her institutionalized uncle Jean (Godard), a washed-up film director whose muttered aphorisms include "Kids today are scum." Carmen convinces the addled uncle that she and her lover plan to use his apartment to shoot a documentary, but in reality she intends to use it in a kidnapping plot. Jacques Bonaffé is the hapless policeman who pursues Carmen and, faced with her self–possessed beauty, flails ineffectually at his flaccid penis-one of many images of impotence in late Godard.