Orphée

Jean Cocteau is a complete aesthetic package and I love him.

Cocteau seems to get an idea for a film based around some themes that spark ideas in him, and then includes a lot of images purely for aesthetic reasons. His films seem to belong to no real tradition. He's a tradition unto himself.

One of the things that really seems to be on his mind here is the middle aged slump into mediocrity. He was 60 years old when he made this film, so his Orpheus's fear that his artistic power has waned must have been a real concern. If you make a film this beautiful, you needn't worry.

I love that his film has poetry groupies who swarm poets for autographs. The suggestion that Orpheus may have plagiarized Cégeste's work causes poets to storm his house. What a world!

This film is all sleek black leather and beautiful lo-fi special effects.

Juliette Gréco and Jean-Pierre Melville show up.

This film is an updating of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The film updates the action to post-war France, with Orpheus (played by Jean Marais) a famous but dis-satisfied poet.

The film focuses on the themes of love and death. Most notably Orpheus falling in love with a glamorous incarnation of Death (Maria Casares).

Writer-director Jean Cocteau turns the everyday world into a magical realm. Mirrors turn to pools which are portals to other worlds, car radios pick up coded messages from Death's World. In less talented hands than Cocteau's, the delicate fantasy could have easily become ridiculous but he handles it with brilliance and the film works perfectly.

Here Cocteau creates a truly poetic film. The story is magical and entertaining and the film is filled with wonderously surreal images (particularly striking is the frequent use of filming an action performed backwards, and then reversing it which creates a very strange impression).

From its explosive opening where a brawl occurs at a café for poets that's "the nerve-centre of the world" to traveling through the afterlife to the very end, Orphée's mania never stops. It's an incredibly gripping and bizarre film which immediately evolves into a bad dream. It's grandest aspect is the visual treat that visionary director Jean Cocteau offers. The camera is fluid and active, whipping between characters and sets, exploring high and low angles. Though the highlight is the special effects, especially for its time even if clearly channeling Méliès, with seamless reversed shots, projections, wires and point of view shots involving mirrors. The narrative flows fluently to give a rich and inventive story, with elements of innovative humour, with double meanings and exaggerations, and tragedy redeemed. With its ambiguity between reality, dream or fantasy world, it could even be argued that there is no reality and it begins right in the fantasy, though the expert use of foreshadowing renders that aspect irrelevant in cinema.

Despite it having a very compacted story, there's not enough emotional or thought-provoking ideas there for me to understand why it's considered a masterpiece, especially due to its consistent tension, rather than an ideal fluctuating tone. The characters, besides the surprising supporting character Heurtebise with a subtle performance from François Périer, there is little chemistry between the actors, who for the majority of the time give melodramatic performances solely for the camera. As it's a story trying to be about love, this only comes across as a sidenote to the spectacle. There is, however, the fascinating idea of how an artist can be so enamoured with inspiration that they neglect their real life and purpose of why they're creating their art. It also does not show any of the deaths, the films other main theme, which dramatically decreases their potential power. There is an incidental scene where the Inspector is talking to people in his office in which it has a brief flashback while a man is talking of what he's talking about - a technique Hiroshima Mon Amour later innovated. With the dazzling and inventive direction, Orphée is a great film, but too often doesn't take itself seriously enough.

8/10

It was fantastic that I got to see this film, yet odd that it had to be from the video selection of my English faculty library. So, headphones it was, on a typically cold English February day, in a place of learning.

I quickly took to this spirited, ambitious film; a heady concoction that blends fantasy and reality beautifully. This is truly one of the aesthetically wondrous films one could ever wish to see... it has a visual poetry that beguiles the eye, as well as the verbal poetry of a fine script. This is a Cocteau film in which he goes a bit deeper into his characters; while the acting is 'stagy' (in quite an appealing manner) the use of location firmly grounds the piece in an initial contemporary, provincial French town. Cocteau's camera takes in all that is necessary and no more, in conveying his lucid dream visions. That the realism so convinces, in its way of establishing a sleepy, unremarkable French town, really helps the fantasy to come across within a richly plausible context.

Many touches seem audacious and visionary - the very fact of translating this ancient myth to contemporary France, the brilliant device of having Orpheus enraptured by at times otherworldly, at times mundane messages conveyed through a crackling car radio... the imagery of a mirror turning watery as it is passed through; this is sublime, artful stuff, of a heavily metaphysical, cerebral yet enjoyable nature. Maria Casares is absolutely splendid as the "Princess", an aspect of Death; beautifully sleek and stern, with a suppressed tenderness brought out later in the film. Casares brilliantly conveys the sense of a timeless creature of the ages, despite her being only in her 27th year when it was made. Jean Marais is wonderfully theatrical in his acting; a good portrayal of the flawed artist - in this case 'poet', chasing after inspiration rather than worldly happiness. The overlaps with Cocteau himself, autobiographically, add a little extraneous interest... certain scenes seem to refer to Cocteau's position in France, and interestingly also the occupation, with the leather clad motor-cyclists and absurdist underground tribunals...

I should mention the character Heurtebise, treated deftly by Cocteau; who seems to find most to relate to in his male leads, Orpheus and Heurtebise. While the very feminine Death is portrayed exceptionally, Maria Dea's Eurydice is I feel, seen as quite insignificant, though Dea does her best. It's a shame Juliette Greco gets such short shrift in her role as Aglaonice; much is hinted at early on, regarding her antagonistic character, that is not followed up. Francois Perier is wonderful as Heurtebise; along with Casares the most memorable performance here. Perier really makes you believe in and sympathize with this character, as well as having a matter-of-fact eccentricity comparable to Marius Goring's Conductor in "A Matter of Life of Death".

Auric and Hayer do a superb job fine-tuning and moulding Cocteau's tantalizing vision of art, death and love. The film is technically brilliant, the trick shots superbly pulled off and the atmosphere always compelling, involving the viewer, despite the latent abstract quality of the film.

This really is a film to lose yourself in; a lyrical feat of visual poetry with the majestic sense of dream. It is film fantasy as it all too seldom has been; sublimely imaginative and fluidly inventive.

Rating:- **** 1/2/*****

If ever a film could me called `magical', `hypnotic' and `compelling', then surely that film is ORPHEUS; magical because it is such an incredible feat of the imagination; hypnotic because it is a relentless assault upon all the senses, the intellect and the emotions, and compelling because it is a profound attempt to at least illustrate, (it is not so arrogant as to presume to solve!), the mystery of life, our awareness of death and human consciousness endlessly seeking some sort of certainty to comfort ourselves with. Layered with various ambiguous possibilities, and full of symbols which will resonate in a variety of ways according to each individual viewer, each viewing of the film draws you deeper into its mystery again and again, and each time teaches you more and more. Perhaps it could only have been made when it was, (in the aftermath of WW2), and where it was, (in a country that had decided to do a deal with Death and then lived to regret it). Perhaps because Jean Cocteau was so talented in so many fields, people seldom seem to note what an utterly brilliant film director he was, and his work in this respect with ORPHEUS, stands comparison with anybody's. The film is also so complete, and unravels so perfectly and in such a masterly way; not one superfluous scene; superb acting all round, atmospheric photography, and a superbly utilised and sublime score by Georges Auric. I simply cannot imagine a film like this being made now, (perhaps LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD was the last gasp of this type of didactic artistic consciousness), and this depresses me greatly, because it shows that `progress' is not an automatic, upwardly rising arc, but a curve that can go backwards as well as forwards. Anyone who has even the slightest affection for cinema should watch this film, and marvel, surrender, and learn from it. Without doubt in my book, one of the ten greatest movies ever made. So much so that I almost feel privileged to have been born into the time frame that could access it.