223. Orphée (Orpheus) (1950)

Directed By Jean Cocteau

Synopsis

Do you know the story of Orpheus? Then it's like that, only transposed to the modern world and Orpheus falls in love with Death and Death falls in love with him, while a ghost chauffeur falls in love with Eurydice. Oh and people can walk through mirrors into the underworld, which is kind of an inquisitorial, bureaucratic place.


Review

First things first, the book states that this is from 1949, but all other sources have it as 1950, so we can consider it the first film of the 50s on the list and be done with it. So we inaugurate the 50s. Yay!

Cocteau has a talent like no one else at the same time in cinema to create an otherworldly environment unlike anything you have ever seen. The ingenious use of very simple and very effective Special Effects alone make the film worthy of admission.

Cocteau has the kind of experimental love for the format of the film as a visual piece that seems to have been lost since talkies came along. Very few directors, and certainly no American director, in the 30's and 40's were interested in experimentalism, on using the screen as a canvas for artistic exploration, the advent of speech led to having elaborate plays on camera, where the dialogue is as important if not more than the image.

Cocteau has the great artist's eye for the cinema as a visual medium primarily and a literary medium secondarily. That does, unfortunately create the only problem in the film, where the story told is quite inferior to the imagery used to tell it. But if you only let yourself be swept away in the dream-like weirdness of it all you will just love it for what it is. A beautiful, ingenious and brilliant piece of art.

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Cocteau adds many elements from the culture of his time. For example, the messengers of the Princess of Death are grim, leather-clad motorcyclists. The underworld is represented by buildings in France which were still in ruins after World War II, and Orpheus's trial in the underworld is presented in the manner of an inquest held by officials of the German occupation attempting to discover members of the French resistance. At the very end of the film, the Princess and Heurtebise are prisoners, brought forward to face the tribunal, ominously elevated on a pedestal above them.

Most notably, the element of the myth in which Orpheus looks back at Eurydice as she is being led out of the underworld, exactly what he was told not to do and which causes him to lose her, is represented by Orpheus happening to glance at Eurydice in the rear-view mirror of a car.

Through the Glass: