ORPHEUS Movie Review

Orphee

The legend of Orpheus, the poet whose fascination with death takes him on a search that leads from this world to the next, is updated to a modern Parisian setting by perhaps the only other poet up to the job: Jean Cocteau. Cocteau's Orpheus (Jean Marais) is a brooding, masculine, dissatisfied dreamer whose earthly wife, Eurydice (Marie Déa), is disposed of by the jealous Princess of Death (Maria Casarés) when the Princess's obsession with Orpheus begins to equal his fascination with her. We've seen lots of figures of death in the movies, from Bengt Ekerot in Bergman's The Seventh Seal to Royal Dano in The Right Stuff, but only Casarés—cloaked in black, irresistibly sensuous, as comfortable on an earthbound motorcycle as she is floating through the next world—has made us feel death's darkly glamorous appeal. A miracle of elegance and ingenuity on just about every level, Cocteau's Orpheus allows his poet/hero to receive messages from beyond on his car radio and to plunge through mirrors as the gateway to Death's underworld kingdom; these are notions far more thrilling than mere “special effects,” for they allow a poet's vision to transform the world we live in into a magical landscape fraught with possibilities, wonders, and mystery. With this audacious and moving fairy tale for grown-ups, Cocteau has visualized our eternal struggle with sensuality and death by conjuring the power of a child's view of the world, making us see the simplest and most basic things around us as if for the first time.

NEXT STOP … The Blood of a Poet, Beauty and the Beast (1946), The Testament of Orpheus, The Seventh Seal

1949 95m/B Jean Marais, Francois Perier, Maria Casares, Marie Dea, Edouard Dermithe, Juliette Greco; D: Jean Cocteau; W: Jean Cocteau; C: Nicolas Hayer; M: Georges Auric. VHS, 8mm SNC, NOS, VYY