First Name: Carmen

Two unknown criminals plan a bank job with the help of a radical cell, but the scheme grows tangled when a female participant grows dangerously close to the officer charged with guarding the vault. Godard reimagines Carmen as a contemporary, media savvy presence, turning the crime caper into a reflective swarm of motives rather than a straightforward plot. The film keeps cutting between dialogue, strangers on the street, and slick cinematic stills to test how stories about crime shape our sense of risk, loyalty, and gender. As alliances shift, the line between attraction and allegiance blurs, while the audience watches the clock and the camera anticipate outcomes without revealing them. It's playful and abrasive, a puzzle rather than a confession.

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, the film adapts a Carmen inspired premise with a script credited to Prosper Mérimée and Anne-Marie Miéville. Released in 1983, it sits among Godard's late era experiments that blend cinema with political meditation and satire today.

Box office data for this art house release is not widely published and the film exists mostly in critical studies and festival circuits worldwide. It is typically discussed as part of Godard's experimental approach rather than as a commercial success.

Godard's Carmen carries his signature riffs on media, gender, and spectatorship, turning a classic crime tale into a meditation on how films shape our sense of danger and desire. The movie's sly meta play and audacious visual choices have kept it in conversations about cinema as political art and invention.

Critics noted its dissonant tone and genre bending, with many highlighting power dynamics and the tension between crime and romance as drivers of the narrative. The film invites viewers to interrogate not just wrongdoing but the public gaze that surrounds it. It remains a touchstone for scholarly debates about cinema.