OrpheusEurydice1.0321

Jean Cocteau, screenplay and director, “Orphée.”1949; motion picture, (André Paulvé, 1950; Criterion Collection, 2000).

This mesmerizing 1949 film, part of the Orphic Trilogy by one of my favorite artists, the French surrealist Jean Cocteau, begins by establishing Orpheus as a beautiful, hip poet spurned by the other beautiful, hip poets who hang out smoking and drinking at the Poets’ Café in Paris. Orpheus is unpopular—his poetry has been too successful. When a brawl breaks out and one of the poets is killed, death arrives in a Rolls-Royce and takes Orpheus and the dead poet away.

Cocteau’s special effects are spectacularly rudimentary. In “La Belle et la Bête,” a retelling of “Beauty and the Beast,” he famously shows Belle floating down a hallway, an effect crudely realized on an early “moving sidewalk.” But Cocteau achieves a quality common to both myths and fairy tales: he makes the everyday seem magical. In “Orphée,” mirrors fly through the air and clouds surround mystical highways, parting the way as Death drives. The effect is blissfully vague, a dreamlike montage. At the end of the film, Orpheus—having been killed by a group of beatnik lesbians—is resurrected, and becomes immortal when Death sacrifices herself for him. He drifts off to a happy, bland fate, a conclusion that beautifully embodies Tolkien’s idea that happy endings can be as dispiriting as tragic ones: “Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” - Rachel Arons, The New Yorker.