Carmen, Camille, and the Undoing of Women

This chapter takes a single film as its starting point: The Wild, Wild Rose (1960), a Mandarin musical inspired by the music and plot of Bizet’s opera Carmen. The film’s portrayal of its songstress amalgamates two very different iconic fictional personas, the fiery temptress Carmen, and the self-sacrificing courtesan Camille, from The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils. The film’s citational strategies are rooted in a history of adaptation, translation, and hybridizing exchanges extending back to the early twentieth century, and formative of a tradition of popular sentimental fiction. The film serve as a case study for tracking the ways in which this tradition passed from the printed page to the screen and consequently generated a distinctive strand of Chinese film melodrama. Chinese musicals developed in the orbit of this melodramatic mode, and the songstress points to dialogic interactions between cinema, literature, theater, and opera.