ORPHEUS (1950)

The poet Orpheus is at a poet's café in Paris, feeling ignored by the newer, hipper poets (I'm tempted to call them "beatniks" though that concept didn't exist in 1950) because he's too commercial. The hot young poet Cégeste shows up drunk and stumbling on the arms of a woman known only as the Princess. He gets into a brawl and is hit by two motorcyclists in black leather. Her chauffeur Heurtebise puts him in the back seat of her car to take him to the hospital and she asks Orpheus to come along as a witness. During the trip, the view of the landscape turns to a photographic negative and we hear odd radio transmissions ("Silence goes backward faster"; "The bird sings with its fingers") that Orpheus comes to think are beautiful if very obscure poems. Orpheus discovers that Cégeste is dead and they head to the Princess' isolated home where Cégeste is laid out on a bed. The Princess waves her hand in the air and he comes back to life. With Orpheus watching, the Princess, Cégeste, and the two motorcyclists walk through a full-length mirror into what we find out is the underworld. The Princess is death personified. Orpheus cannot follow and the next time we see him, he wakes up in a quarry with Heurtebise standing near the car. The chauffeur has been instructed to take Orpheus back to his wife Eurydice and stay with him. Though Eurydice has been worried by his absence, she also seems disturbed by his return as her friends in the League for Women don't approve of Orpheus, and he refuses to explain his absence. She is also, we discover, pregnant. Soon, Eurydice is struck and killed by the black leather motorcyclists. Heurtebise offers to take Orpheus through the mirror underworld, but he must decide who he is in love with: Eurydice or Death.

This beautiful but often obscure film is a recasting of the Orpheus myth, in which Orpheus is allowed to go to the Underworld to bring back his dead wife Eurydice under the condition that, on their trip back, he doesn’t turn around and look at her. He does. She goes back to the land of death and he is literally torn apart by female followers of Dionysus during an orgy. This version dispenses with the finale, and indeed gives Orpheus and Eurydice a happy ending, with a less happy one for the Princess of Death. I've seen this film a few times over the years, and it's best not to read it as an exact replica of the myth, but as a dreamy fantasy that pulls elements from the myth to create a whole new narrative. It remains a movie full of ambiguity and mystery, and those elements will stymie some viewers. Roger Ebert called it that rare film that is made for "purely artistic reasons," and if you can leave yourself open to letting the visuals and the moods wash over you and let yourself think about it rather than interpret it, you might enjoy the experience. Jean Cocteau wrote and directed, and used some amazing special effects that, while perhaps seeming primitive today, are still effective: reverse motion, slow motion, film cuts, obvious rear projection. The utterly bizarre trips to and from the underworld are indeed quite otherworldly, and all of today's CGI probably could not achieve such an effective evocation of mood. The nonsense radio messages, Cocteau said, were inspired by resistance messages sent over the radio in WWII, an explanation that does not erase the effectiveness of the strange transmissions. In what is truly an art film, the acting is not the most important element, but the actors are mostly fine. I find Jean Marais as Orpheus (above left), the weak link in the cast, giving a surface performance as though he was just following the director's instructions. But Maria Caseres (Death) and Francois Périer (Heurtebise) bring some emotional depth to their mostly symbolic roles; Maria Dea is fine as Eurydice—not an especially sympathetic character—and Edouard Dermithe makes an impression in his limited role as Cégeste. I rarely felt emotionally engaged with the characters, but the visuals and the atmosphere and the odd stylistic touches (on screen and in script) make this worth watching as perhaps the archetypal art film of the 1950. Pictured at right are Périer and Marais. [TCM]