Choreographer Ramón Oller has no illusions about how many “Carmens” there have been — he goes out of his way to tot them up in the program. He leaves out a few —Beyoncé Knowles in the MTV version? — but he makes his point. Every culture eventually makes its move on the famous temptress; even Merimée’s original story was a Frenchman’s campy take on Andalusian gypsy life.

In his production that opened at the Joyce on Wednesday night, Mr. Oller and his Compañía Metros try to seduce Carmen back to Barcelona, setting their mélange of contemporary and flamenco on a modern Spanish rooftop. There the naughty girl flirts her way into tragedy, a topless scene, and a climactic flood, which has rather opposite the intended effect. As water gushes across the stage, the dancers spinning and collapsing in its waves, it only highlights the way Mr. Oller’s distillation of the original has quenched the story’s heat. Boiling the plot down to its essentials — woman seduces man, woman sees bullfighter, woman totally reevaluates concept of “man” — has left Mr. Oller with a few white-hot moments swamped in some surprisingly weak tea.

Carmen (Sandrine Rouet) has lost many of her defining characteristics. She no longer slashes another girl in a knife fight, no longer reads her own fortune, no longer faces her death with either insouciance or courage. Instead, Mr. Oller has her flip her red scarf at a number of identically dressed coworkers until one of them dumps his shrill, spacy girlfriend for her. Despite the downgrade from “force of nature” to “sassy miss,” Ms. Rouet invests her dancing with feline grace and unselfconsciousness; kittenish, she wraps herself around suitors but darts away when they try to pet her. Tellingly, José only nabs her when a jealous Micaela (Sau-Ching Wong) douses her with a bucket of water. Cats hate getting wet.

Mr. Oller gives his antiheroine a number of sultry moves — she dives backward, forcing men to catch her, and she seems to spend half her time with her skirt over her head. The partnering stays close and contemporary, although many of the lifts leave the women in strangely unflattering shapes in the air. Despite stripping Carmen to the waist for her love duet with José, Mr. Oller has left the vocabulary nowhere to go — the sexiness can’t crescendo. Or so we think. The roaring entrance of Torero (Christian Lozano) ups the ante: The air changes, the tempos pick up, and the evening finally explodes.

Of all the performances, only Mr. Lozano’s can match the epic scale of the music, a spliced-together soundscape of Bizet peppered with modern Spanish pop-flamenco composer Martirio. The constant hopping between musical genres only rarely calls attention to itself, and the opera almost always sounds comfortable with its more casual counterpart. But towering over the other dancers, shirtless under his shiny matador’s epaulets, Mr. Lozano devours the stage. The men, pawing at red dust like bulls, rush at him — but he spins away. The girls, twittering at his chest, fall as he picks them off, one by one. When Carmen, still nude from her tryst with José, stands amid the chaos he has created, you expect her to pass out at his feet.

Here we also see Mr. Oller at his best. Throughout he has featured Mari Carmen García, a flamenco dancer, as an unsteady dramaturgical structure. Part madam, part narrator, part attention-starved fellow roof-dweller, Ms. García drills her heels into the boards, using her zapateado to insist that Carmen pitch herself at the nearest hunk. Unfortunately, she pulls focus and unnecessarily crowds the storyline. But the sinuous arms and rat-a-tat footwork of flamenco have profoundly inspired Mr. Oller, and once he sets his flashing bullfighter’s heels loose into his more controlled choreography, we see the thrilling possibilities. No wonder the rest of the piece (not to mention Carmen) dies hastily the moment that our matador steps off centerstage.

Since “Carmen” runs only 70 minutes, even the evening’s repetitions provide small cause for complaint. Mr. Oller has settled for creating an atmosphere, and by and large he succeeds. The night feels hot and close, thanks to Gloria Montesinos’s lighting design, and wet, half-naked dancers certainly push the sexy message. But in his effort to integrate a classic piece into his modern idiom, the director doesn’t tap the primal depths of “Carmen.” If you saw only Mr. Oller’s version, you might think: Pretty girl plus loose morals equal a bad end. After all this time, lust and violence should add up to much more than that.

Until March 4 (175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street, 212-691-9740).