Review of Orpheus (2013) by Emanuel D — 07 Nov 2007

How dare a film-maker challenge us as viewers? How dare he do simple camera tricks straight out of the fun of using a camera from 1905 to tell his story? How dare he carry contradictions, leave threads untied, confuse the real with the imaginary? How dare a film-maker re-tell a story from the Greek myths, without embarrassment and without child-oriented spectacle, and set it in his time and his town?

Well Cocteau dares to do all this in his making of the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus is too lost in his music to notice that his Eurydice has died. He follows her to the other side convincing the operators of the afterlife to let her come back with him by seducing them with his music. They permit it on condition that Orpheus never looks at Eurydice. Of course this condition is impossible to meet and Orpheus makes a brutal end at the hands of nymphs.

Can such a story be told set in 1950s Paris? Only if it is complicated a little bit more, Cocteau would suggest. Orphée (Jean Marais) is a poet in a Paris where every other man seems to be one and they converge in cafes to compare notes. Marais is impossibly handsome, at the time of making the film he was an ex-lover of Cocteau. He plays a poet whose verses are loved by the audiences but he is despised by his professional community for reasons that are probably related to his being a bit of a drama queen.

At a brawl in the café a series of strange episodes occur. Put briefly a very young poet Jacques Cégeste (Edouard Dermithe, another pretty boy, at the time of filming the lover of Cocteau) is killed in a freak traffic accident and is put in a big Rolls by his patroness described vaguely as La Princesse (Maria Casares).

The Princess singles out Orphée from the crowd and asks him to join them in the Rolls because â??she needs a witnessâ??. Orphée thinks they are going to hospital but instead they are driven in a sort of dream world where nothing is what it should be.

La Princesse is â??deathâ??. Reasonably she explains that if she walked around with a cape and scythe her job would be distinctly more complicated. Instead she wears what two dozen years after the film would be sold from sex shops as a domina outfit or from clothes shops as power-suits for career women.

Promptly Orphée is in love with Death. Surprisingly the feeling is mutual. In spite of the protestations of Deathâ??s assistant Heurtebise (François Périer), Death over-steps her authority and kills Mrs Orphée (Marie Déa) out of jealousy. Simply to ensure the matter is sufficiently complex Heurtebise fancies Eurydice though he cannot do much to help her except to try to humour Orphée who seems to be entirely distracted by his craft of writing poetry and decoding strange signals on the car radio that seem to be addressed to him as coded messages of inspiration.

It is all quite odd, compounded by old fashioned trick shots of walking through mirrors, people fading, and ghosts gliding on an out of shot wheeled cart.

And yet it works mostly for what it dares to try and only after for what it manages to achieve.

It dares to try a Greek myth which is the story telling genre that is both in the collective unconscious of every story told in the western world and, in its elemental structure, the most fantastically outlandish source to tell stories.

The thing with Greek myths is that they give us the basic, fundamental elements of what we understand a story to be. In its gods and heroes are cast in their purest forms all human weaknesses and frailties: vanity, pride, greed, sloth. Even, if you will, love, seen by the Greeks as the ultimate downfall of our species especially when it involves women. Love between men is after all distinctly less complicated.

Style of story telling has changed of course. Contemporaries of Cocteau would have considered the use of deus ex machina in their story telling is infantile and incompetently facile. Being forbidden by the supernatural from glancing on the woman you live with is a petty form of redemption, a bit like turning into a statue of salt when glancing back on burning Gomorra. Perhaps it is why the film takes this portion of the film with almost slapstick humour. It is the irony of a thoughtful film confronting a thoughtless plot device.

Being asked to make the leap into Greek mythology is being asked to look into the elemental forces behind western story telling: the building blocks of our fiction and our own values. This is like returning to an archeologial site of antiquity admiring the foundations and the ruins on which our civilisation will be built. Appreciating Cocteauâ??s film requires of its audiences the imagination of visitors to ancient ruins. The Acropolis may not have the obvious and garish comforts of a Las Vegas casino but a close look will demonstrate its intrinsic value for anyone willing to see it and enjoy it.

The Gluck tune from the eponymous opera will squeeze your heart.