With Opera Australia fielding three different productions of Carmen over the last five years – John Bell’s fine new Cuban take replacing Francesca Zambello’s traditional staging, and Gail Edwards’ bleak offering on Sydney Harbour – it’s not as if Australian audiences need to go out of their way to catch Bizet’s greatest hit. To make an outing worthwhile, a cinema showing needs to tick one of several boxes at least: insightful staging, impressive music-making or sheer operatic star-power.

^{Opera di Roma’s Carmen. Photos © Opera di Roma}

This version from Opera di Roma may not boast the greatest names on today’s circuit, but it does come with a promising concept. Like Bell, Argentinian director Valentina Carrasco has plumped for a Latin American setting – in this case Mexico – but, rather more boldly, she chooses to go for the here and now, the better to bring out the contemporary resonances of Bizet’s story. Like Edwards too she has an open-air setting – in this case the spectacular ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. But unlike the drab Carmen on the Harbour, which chose to ignore site specificity, Carrasco...