Labeling a film dealing with African societies as a musical is somewhat redundant.  After all, what is a musical?  Radical stylization.  An impossibility in western civilizations.  Stories in which, at any given moment, a character can break into song and dance in place of speech.  It’s the absolute antithesis of the way we live out our everyday lives.  How many times have you told your boss that you were going on your lunch break, but in a rhythmic song and dance that soon has the whole workplace jumping and singing in unison?  Musicals have no relation whatsoever to the way we function in society.  But in our society.  Not entirely so in those of Africa.

In many of them, the spoken word is easily replaced by musical chants.  African cultures tend to be oral, their histories passed down from generation to generation through a tradition that relies on human interaction, not always the written word.  This oral tradition easily encompasses song and dance, or the performative.  It’s a mode of expression that approaches the spectacle.  And what a beautiful spectacle we have on display in Karmen Gei.

In some respects, the film is considered to be a sort of African musical, and quite possibly the first of its kind.  This is only so because when one speaks of musicals, one must refer to classical Hollywood cinema by default.  For the musical is, along with the western, a distinctly indigenous genre of American film.  Like a Hollywood musical, Karmen Gei has more than one song and dance routine.  Like a Hollywood musical, its characters trade the spoken word for the melodious one at the drop of a dime.  And like a Hollywood musical, Karmen Gei possesses a fantastic element that likens it to the rebellious bird that so many speak of in the film, refusing to be tamed by the laws of conventional narrative and existing on a plane all its own.

Of course, its roots lie in Merimee’s classic novella and Bizet’s much celebrated opera.  The Carmen myth.  This film gives that myth a Senegalese rebirth, and in doing so gives it a new significance.  The director, Joseph Gai Ramaka, fashions his tale along the lines of a picaresque adventure.  Karmen begins in a woman’s prison, then through a series of escapades in which she arouses the desire of numerous men and women, ends at the edges of the sea.  Her death, above a stage where the final musical act is performed, is the last leg of her journey.  Like all tragic heroes, she invites it.  She sees premonitions of it.  Prophecies that are fulfilled.  Karmen is a provocative force too difficult to contain.  Her death, ironic in its simplicity.  Her life, transcendent in its mythology.

Karmen symbolizes the yearnings of modern woman to be free, physically and mentally.  Truly free.  This is why visions of her death feature throngs of women, all masked by some sort of barrier that hides their identity (or perhaps, robs them of it).  Seen in this light, Karmen’s death is martyrdom.  Her peers wait patiently for her, neither speaking nor moving.  Certainly not singing or dancing.  Waiting for the moment when she will return from whence she came.  Even in death, they remain chained, while Karmen remains free.  An untamed spirit.  A rebellious bird.  Completely free.  So is this film.  The exact reason for its beauty.

*Originally published in Urban Stage & Screen in 2002