The first collaboration between dancer Antonio Gades and director Carlos Saura, Blood Wedding, was a stark dress rehearsal in a dance studio; the second, Carmen, was a realistic backstage musical, or anyway as realistic as its life-imitating-art gambits would permit. This third one is something altogether different again, a fully mounted dance production contained entirely on a studio sound stage (or contained thereon after the first shot, when a metal door slams shut on the outside world, and the camera gropes its way to the stylized set). The set alone, an urban shantytown of tin shacks and automobile carcasses, more than justifies this new turn, with its translucent clamshell of a sky, and its strange crepuscular light, and its sudden gusts of wind, and the wonderful sound of shoes on the sanded ground. And of course Gades, even if no other justification were available, is a screen natural, with a remarkable face to go along with remarkable feet, hands, legs. (Cristina Hoyos, who actually has the lead role here, is no slouch in those departments either.) The filmmakers have had to pad out the original Manuel de Falla score, with plenty of encores and additional music and bits of dialogue and total silences; and the movie, through all that, occasionally goes a little slack. But even so it's a more interesting narrative than Carmen, and a refreshingly healthy one, too. With Laura del Sol and Juan Antonio Jimenez. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd