First Name: Carmen

First Name: Carmen (Prénom Carmen, 1983) is Jean-Luc Godard's drama, available to watch online on iFILM. A loose riff on Bizet's opera that keeps only the doomed, headlong passion and throws out almost everything else.

Carmen tells her uncle she's making a movie with friends and borrows his seaside apartment. The real plan is a bank robbery. Mid-heist she runs into Joseph, a young guard — they brawl on the lobby floor, and a beat later they can't keep their hands off each other. What follows is a string of getaways, safe houses, guns and a love affair that wrecks them both. Godard himself plays the eccentric filmmaker uncle, parked in a clinic and fresh out of ideas.

This is late Godard: jagged cuts, a Beethoven string quartet in place of a score, the roar of the sea and scraps of overheard talk standing in for plot. The film took the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Come to it if you want cinema as experiment rather than a story with a tidy arc — a meditation on a woman, on desire, and on the act of filming itself. Stream First Name: Carmen (1983) online on iFILM.