Word: orpheus
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Leading the Gallic pack are Orpheus and Ways of Love. The latter is a trilogy involving three directors, Marcel Pagnol, Renoir, and the Italian Roberto Ressellinl; Anna Magnani contributes. At the Paris (58th off Fifth...
...Orpheus (Paulvé; Discina), Avant-Gardist Jean Cocteau's latest plunge through the lookingglass, carries him into an enigmatic dream world that blends myth, realistic thriller and fantasy. Laureled in Venice, praised and damned in Paris and London, it is a film to frustrate any moviegoer who demands a logical explanation of what he is looking at. For those willing to drift with Cocteau's reverie, catching what wisps of meaning they can, the movie is an interesting experience...
Borrowing from his one-act play, Orpheus (1926) and his surrealist film, Blood of a Poet (1933), Jack-of-All-Arts Cocteau has written and directed a modern version of the legend in which Orpheus charms the gods into returning his dead wife, Eurydice, to life. As Cocteau has it, Orpheus (Jean Marais) is a celebrated poet and national hero who falls in love with a satellite of death in the shape of a beautiful princess (Maria Casares). The princess covets Orpheus, takes Eurydice (Maria Dea) before her time. Confused by his love for both women, the poet journeys...
...Cocteau's up-to-date mythology, death's handmaiden rides in a Rolls-Royce, flanked by grim motorcyclists, and communicates with Orpheus by shortwave radio. Her immediate superiors in the beyond-a bombed-out no man's land between the living and the dead-are a trio of business-suited bureaucrats in a chain of command that goes on into infinity. The role of the avenging Bacchantes, who tore Orpheus apart in the ancient myth, is now taken by a seedy bunch of envious poets who gather in what looks like Paris' Café de Flore...
What does it all mean? "Don't try to understand," the princess tells one of her victims, and Cocteau echoes her in an "explanation" that is not much more enlightening than his movie. Orpheus is no allegory, he says, but simply an attempt to touch entertainingly in film metaphor on a scrambled collection of such themes as free will, inspiration and the poet's preoccupation with death. What the movie does with these themes is as elusive and disjointed as a half-remembered dream...