It seems like I spend a lot of time trying to catch on stuff on my watchlists, especially on HBO Max, before they expire, to the point where movies that may not be going anywhere for a while get ignored. Case in point: the many Criterion Collection foreign language films on HBO Max. I should really watch a few of them once in a while, particularly if they all get pulled at some point in the future. So, why not start with something in French? And hey, I like a lot of mythology, so why not a French take on a Greek myth?
That’s basically how I got to Orpheus.
After a brief retelling of the myth of Orpheus, the film opens in what was then a contemporary Paris. The poet Orpheus (Jean Marais) is the toast of the literary scene, but one day while out at a cafe, he sees a car pull up with another poet, Cegeste (Edouard Dermit) and a mysterious woman known only as the princess (Maria Casares). Cegeste is drunk, and after a belligerent encounter, he wanders into the street where he is struck and killed by two passing motorcycles. The princess insists Orpheus accompany her and Cegeste in her limo to get him help, something that doesn’t make a lot of sense of Orpheus for a number of reasons, not the least of which being they pass the hospital and the motorcyclists join the limo on the road. The group ends up at a long-abandoned country house, and Orpheus, though frequently berated by the princess to stop asking questions and stay put, eventually learns the truth: she is actually Death, and she’s there to escort Cegeste’s soul to the underworld.
Or, more precisely, she is referred to as “Orpheus’s Death,” and the two seem to be in love with each other. Factor in as well Orpheus’s obsession with a radio station broadcasting weird poetry that can only be picked up by Death’s Rolls Royce, and it isn’t long before his wife Eurydice (Marie Dea) starts to grow very concerned. Her best comfort comes in the form of Death’s limo driver Huertebise (Francois Perier), himself a ghost that seems intent on helping both Eurydice and Orpheus with the strange things the pair are going through. Will the film end the same way the myth does, or is there hope for Orpheus and Eurydice to somehow get a happy ending out of all this?
Oh, I really liked this one. Writer/director Jean Cocteau wasn’t interested in the mechanics of the afterlife so much as he was the path of the poet. Yes, there’s a lot of weird stuff going on, and Cocteau uses a number of simple camera tricks, most notably simply running footage backwards, to show an otherworldly, unnatural place, but he never stops to explain how this afterlife works. It just looks like the real world if everything fell apart and was windy for some and not for others. Mirrors are a potent thing in this movie, acting as a portal to the underworld and a way to doom a woman who has to stay literally out of her husband’s sight for the rest of their lives.
But really, this is a film about a man in love with his own death and the toll it takes on those around him. Yeah, maybe Huertebise is trying to be helpful, acting as a guide to the underworld when needed and pointing out the flaws in Death’s arguments and behavior, but Orpheus’s obsession with poetry is what causes most of his problems. Apparently, Cocteau believed a poet needed to go through multiple deaths in order to finally achieve immortality of a sort, but this wild and often surreal film was just the thing I might have been looking for without realizing it. I hope some of those other foreign language films turn out as good as this one when I finally get to them.
Grade: A
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