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Jean Marais is in love with Death in Cocteau's poetic Orphée |
Director: Jean
Cocteau
Cast: Jean Marais (Orphée), François Périer (Heurtebise),
María Casares (The Princess), Marie Déa (Eurydice), Henri Crémieux (L'éditeur),
Juliette Gréco (Aglaonice), Roger Blin (The Poet), Édouard Dermit (Cégeste), René
Worms (Judge)
Cocteau is perhaps the only major poet who became a
filmmaker. His films introduced, naturally, a poetic beauty into the French New
Wave – something that has led many to overlook their embracing of the techniques
of modern cinema. Orphée is his most
successful work, a beautiful re-imagining of the Orpheus myth, set in a smashed
up post-war France, with the afterlife a bombed-out industrial wasteland. It’s
a beautifully made, inventive and hugely impressive film, not without flaws,
that allows you to see the potential magic and inventive sleight-of-hand in
cinema. It’s a treat.
Orphée (Jean Marais, Cocteau’s real life-partner) is a poet
who attracts the attention of a mysterious Princess (María Casares) during a
poets’ café brawl that leaves her current protegee Cégeste (Édouard Dermit)
wounded after he is hit by speeding motorcycle riders. He helps her “transport him to the hospital”
only to find that Cégeste is dead and that the Princess is some sort of
manifestation of Death, transporting artists to the afterlife. The mysterious
motorcycle riders are her assistants, while her driver Heurtebise (François
Périer) also has some sort of role in carrying souls to the afterlife. Orphée
wakes the next morning obsessed with Princess and the cryptic messages he heard
on her car radio, that echo the seemingly meaningless messages of the Free
France radio. His obsession distracts him from his wife Eurydice (Marie Déa),
but when the Princess’ assistants claim her life, Orphée with the help of
Heurtebise (who has fallen in love with Eurydice) feels compelled to journey to
the afterlife to rescue her.
Cocteau’s film captures the poetic beauty of a dream, many
of the events happening with a strange logic in a world that feels a few
degrees askew from ours. It’s a film in love with the personal interpretation
of great poetry, presenting a series of events we are invited to form our own
impressions of. Cocteau’s film also suggests the ever-present link between the
dead and the living – the dead still yearn, in their way, for life (some wander
the afterlife unaware that they are even dead) while the poet Orphée falls in
love with the mystical immortality of death, the all-encompassing love-affair
our soul can have with the afterlife. The Princess is herself drawn towards
poets, whose grace and beauty she can help promote to their own immortality.
To present this strange and unsettling world, Cocteau uses a
host of inventive cinematic tricks that constantly surprise and delight. The
Princess’ helpers feel like they invented the cosplay aesthetic with their
burly short-sleeve shirts, helmets, dark glasses and machine guns. The
afterlife is a blasted, burnt-out factory with ruined homes and houses around
it and vital meetings and trials taking apart in worn-out rooms with cracked
and decaying walls. The characters move through this afterlife depending on
their status – Orphée crawls through it like treacle, battling against his own
brain struggling to understand where he is, while Heurtebise glides through it
seemingly without moving his feet.
The afterlife is accessed by moving through mirrors. Cocteau
uses reflections intriguingly throughout the film – after all mirrors show us
only a version of our world, not the real thing. Mirrors are moved through
either as if they are not there, or melt into liquid that souls can pass
through. Cocteau uses film in reverse to show mirrors smashing and then
reforming themselves, a brilliant effect that looks disconcertingly wrong. He
uses the same technique to show dead souls rising under the Princess’
influence, standing with a bizarre disjointedness (the actors were filmed falling
and the film reversed). The rubber gloves that must be used to move through
mirrors are also shown being put on using reverse photography – the actors were
filmed taking them off and the film is reversed making the gloves seem like
they fly onto the hands. It’s a simple effect but brilliantly done.
Cocteau continues this inventiveness in the afterlife. Some
sets are built on an angle, meaning Orphée at one point crawls along one wall
before sliding impossibly down the next wall. Back projection is brilliantly
used to show Heurtebise manipulating the afterlife around him. It’s a feast of
inventive and imaginative angles, ideas and concepts brilliantly shot. And
mirrors are always the key, the doorway to death and a world like ours but not.
And behind that door, Cocteau presents a fascinating afterlife.
Is the Princess Death? Or just one of many functionaries? Heurtebise too seems
to have some sort of role as Death – and the functionaries of the afterlife
operate under a series of rules that suggest they barely understand the world
of the living any more. Orphée is allowed to take Eurydice home – on condition
he never looks at her, a condition nearly impossible to meet in the real world,
despite Heurtebise’s best efforts. Meanwhile Orphée is fixated on Death,
chasing the Princess through cloisters and a marketplace in the real world,
drawn towards the ghostly messages on the radio (their echoing of French
Resistance messages indicating their link to a deathly past of destruction).
The film throws in a love triangle with Death as the third
wheel. Orphée is moved by the desire for the immortality death can bring, while
the Princess herself perhaps causes Eurydice’s death out of envy and bends the
rules anyway she can to bring herself closer to Orphée. Orphée’s quest for
inspiration and immortality distract him from the everyday love of his wife –
and her pregnancy. Only Heurtebise still seems to yearn for the quiet normality
of everyday life.
The film’s main flaw is that it often fails to invest the
relationship of Orphée and Eurydice with any real emotional depth. Part of this
is the fault of Jean Marais, who delivers a performance that is aiming for
brooding but instead generally comes across as sour and sulky, making him hard
to warm to or invest in, while Marie Déa is given very little to do. The real
interest is in the figures from the afterlife, and María Casares is superb as a
cold, almost dominatrix like Death who slowly finds in herself great longing
(perhaps in part for her previous life on earth). François Périer is similarly
superb as Heurtebise, desperate to feel again as he did when alive.
Despite the film’s lack of real heart and warmth among (of
all things!) it’s living characters, there is so much depth, inventiveness and
bizarre longing in the afterlife that you can more than forget this. Cocteau’s
film is a wonderful dream, an immersive, brilliantly created feast for the
imagination that marries art and cinematic techniques in a way few others have
managed before or since.
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