Jean Cocteau (1950)
Jean Cocteau relocates the Greek myth to contemporary Paris – with great success. There’s an almost documentary flavour to the opening sequences at the Café des Poètes (a bohemian watering-hole) – until the arrival on the scene of Orpheus/Orphée (Jean Marais), a celebrity poet. A black-clad princess (María Casares) and her protégé Cégeste (Edouard Dermithe), a younger poet, are hot on his heels. The drunken Cégeste starts a fight; a (decidedly unrealistic) brawl follows; Cégeste gets run over by a pair of motorcycles. The Princess insists that Orphée act as a witness to the events outside the Café and he gets in her car. Orphée soon realises that Cégeste is dead and that the Princess is not, as she initially claims, taking him to a hospital. They drive instead through a landscape seen in negative through the car windows and arrive at a ruined chateau, where the Princess re-animates or, at least, zombifies Cégeste. He, she and the two motorcycle riders who caused Cégeste’s death and accompanied the car on its journey to the chateau disappear through a mirror. The place in which the film began is already a long way away. A little later, the Princess’s chauffeur Heurtebise (François Périer) drives Orphée back to his Paris home and his adoring, pregnant wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) but this is by now a very qualified actuality and continues to be so for the remainder of Orphée. The reanimated Cégeste persists somewhere between life and death. The distinctions between dream and reality in the story have become porous.
According to Wikipedia, Cocteau summarised his main themes as follows:
‘1. The successive deaths through which a poet must pass before he becomes, in that admirable line from Mallarmé, tel qu’en lui-même enfin l’éternité le change – changed into himself at last by eternity.
2. The theme of immortality: the person who represents Orphée’s Death sacrifices herself and abolishes herself to make the poet immortal.
3. Mirrors: we watch ourselves grow old in mirrors. They bring us closer to death.’
Cocteau also claimed (Wikipedia again) that:
‘Among the misconceptions which have been written [sic] about Orphée, I still see Heurtebise described as an angel and the Princess as Death. In the film, there is no Death and no angel. There can be none. Heurtebise is a young Death serving in one of the numerous sub-orders of Death, and the Princess is no more Death than an air hostess is an angel. I never touch on dogmas. The region that I depict is a border on life, a no man’s land where one hovers between life and death.’
Whether or not we take Cocteau at his written word, his cinematic creation is hard to resist. It’s quite a feat to sustain, as he does, such a confounding tone. His witty drawings and solemn voiceover introducing Orphée foretell the blend of humour and gravitas to follow. Photographed by Nicolas Hayer, the film is dreamlike and beautiful but Cocteau’s special effects are mostly light-hearted. Their playfulness counteracts the metaphysics that, as a written summary, sound forbidding. Orphée must involve the most enchanting use of rubber gloves in movie history. (The hero puts them on to pass through the looking-glass.) The practical mid-twentieth-century difficulties of avoiding looking at Eurydice are especially entertaining. (Orphée accidentally catches sight of his wife in a car’s rear-view mirror.) The mystique of Georges Auric’s supple music, an antidote to frivolity, helps Cocteau maintain his balance of moods. The writer-director’s personal feelings for his leading man no doubt made it easy to ennoble his protagonist and Jean Marais is effective in the role. He may not be much of an actor but his leonine face is a glorious camera subject: Marais’s furrowed brow and the waves in his fine head of hair are a remarkable bit of design. As the Princess/Death (pace Cocteau), María Casares is superbly controlled.
31 October 2018
