Le testament d'Orphée ou ne me demandez pas pourquoi

French national treasure Jean Cocteau's last film is as personal and private as it's title suggest. Le Testament d'Orphee is a fond farewell to cinema with it's free-flowing, spirited collection of images and scenes that includes characters from Cocteau's past films and personal friends. One would hardly imagine a cinematic poet like Jean Cocteau would be so crass as to make something like a mere sequel to his acclaimed Orpheus/Orphee (1950). And instead what Cocteau does is to give us perhaps cinema's first meta-film. The film itself is an autobiographical fantasia of his whole life. Playing various versions of himself, Cocteau glides through the film as a time traveler in search of his place in the universe. He called it an active poem.

The film was shot on location at Les Baux in the South of France, a landscape whose rough limestone canyons appealed to Cocteau even more than Greece. Francine Weinweller and the main crew put up at that gourmet's mecca, the Hostellerie de la Baumaniere. Francine had a costume part in the film as La Dame qui s'est trompe d'epoque. All the icons out of Cocteau's past were woven into the visual testament - mirrors, horses, flowers, tapestries, and many of his friends - Dermit, Marais, Yul Brynner, Picasso and his wife, among others, appeared.

Unfortunately for Cocteau, public and critics, weaned on the literature of commitment popularized by Sartre and Camus, turned their backs on Le Testament d'Orphee, finding it a self-serving celluloid relic, oddly out of step with the times. One voice, however, and an important one, praised the film. Young Francois Truffaut, winner of a large prize for his film Les Quatre Cents Coups, had turned the money over to Cocteau to help finance Le Testament. Truffaut liked the finished product, which he considered a remake, thirty years later, of Le Sang d'un Poete. Truffaut was not alone in seeing Cocteau, judged by his previous films, as one of the main precursors of New Wave filmmakers.

Le Testament d'Orphee is a misunderstood masterpiece. Brilliant!!!!

Modernist renaissance man directed quite a few groundbreaking masterpeices in his time, like the hallucinatory Beauty and the Beast and Blood of a Poet, basically setting the stage for art directors ranging from Ingmar Bergman to Jean-Luc Godard. But here, he made a film so tired and silly looking, it almost crosses the line into so-bad-it's-good.

The film basically consists of the elderly Cocteau himself, wandering through a world of people in crazy-ass costumes, and making faces that bear a striking resemblance to Bela Lugosi's horrified looks in Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda. There are also some elementary special effects (backwards film, for example) that are somewhat less than mind blowing, even by 1960 standards.

Interestingly, the incredulous person staring a people in costumes was done much better 2 years later in Herk Harvey's low budget horror film Carnival of Souls, which, unlike the Testament of Orpheus, is a must see.

My summary is NOT meant to be sarcasm but an accurate description of what I saw in "Testament of Orpheus". It really does play a lot like a home movie of Cocteau's--complete with his friends making guest appearances. A few of the more notable ones are Jean Pierre Leaud, Pablo Picasso and Yul Brynner. As for the plot, it's really hard to describe and it is VERY freaky. It's sort of like a combination of a dream, the life of Cocteau, time travel and Greek mythology all rolled into one very strange film. If you try to make sense of all this, it will probably make your head explode--and it seems pretty clear that Cocteau had no intention of making the film understandable or doing a traditional narrative. Because it is essential a vanity project and an art film, I really cannot rate it. However, I think I'm very safe in saying that the film probably holds no interest to the average viewer but is something best seen by Cocteau-philes and lovers of the avant garde or surreal.

As for me and my own opinion about the film's merits, I thought the project was very repetitive--though it did have a few moments of interesting introspection by Cocteau (who plays himself through the film). Sadly, though, despite his introspection, this is yet another Cocteau film in which he over-used slow-motion and rolled the film backwards again and again to achieve his artsy effects. Essentially, you see nothing new here in the way of techniques--having seen this is "Blood of a Poet" thirty years earlier. And, it does not have any sort of lasting appeal or a coherent story like "Orpheus" or "Beauty and the Beast" (his two masterpieces). Skipable if you ask me but a mildly (very mildly) interesting piece of performance art.

While clearly not the first in its eclectic genre, this classic is definitely a great round-up of all that is surreal - all that the ''mechanics'' of both surrealism as those of dream can be deemed to be all about... Said mechanics fascinated Cocteau, to the point that he had to make this, his final film, a very original ''sequel'' of sorts to his classic ORPHÉE. If only all sequels since had been so original!

The cameos are indeed plentiful as also unexpected; many great stars of 1959 show up, from all fields as all continents! In this, the movie has a time capsule quality that only adds to its surrealness...

Most amazing though is the cameo that is not and could have been; Chaplin, who admired Cocteau -and it was mutual- through the language barrier and everything else that separated them... They had met on a cruise and greeted each other as brothers, though unable to exchange a single word almost... Surely he would have accepted to don the clothes of the Tramp one more time for this unique film... What a surreal addition to an already singular film it would have been! Although, on that cruise, through interpreters, Chaplin had confided that he was sad that he had become rich while playing a poor man... Cocteau admired him all the more for that...

Throughout "Le Testament d'Orphée", the film-goer has the impression of walking through someone else's dream - the director's dream. It is the goal of every film director to have his or her audience view things as if through the director's own eyes - well, I don't think anyone has ever succeeded quite like Cocteau did in this one, his cinematographic swan song as it was as well...

Le Testament d'Orphée is thus highly recommended for so many reasons; Bergman fans as well as those left unimpressed somehow by "Un Chien Andalou", because it was too short; those few will undoubtedly appreciate the long treatment given to this by the master, Jean Cocteau...!

There are nice ideas in this final film by Cocteau. It's a pity he made it in 1959: there had already been Bunuel's l'Age d'or (1930) and Un chien andalou (1929), Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) and The Seventh Seal (1957) that are all brilliant. Not to mention Cocteau's own Sang d'un poete (1930!), in which the relatively simple technical ideas of Testament d'Orphee were already worked out and even better too. Cocteau utilizes terribly slow motion and awkward backwards play. Where Orpheus was ambitious, this is mere pretentious. The acting is mediocre, despite the interesting cast (Cocteau, Brynner, Picasso). Testament is less thought provoking and less surprising than what I hoped for, but nevertheless worth a try. Perhaps I wasn't in the mood for conversations about eloquence and poetry at the time. Still it is at least as interesting as Orson Welles' F for Fake (1975) in which Cocteau also appeared so prominently.

7/10