look in the mirror (Orphée (DVD))

Member Name: george_lazenby

Product:	Orphée (DVD)
Date:	11/01/02 (107 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Beautiful, brilliantly made, very poetic

Disadvantages: mad as a sack of ferrets

It may all have been pretentious twaddle, but Johnny Frenchman knows how to make his art movies. These days, when your average film director comes over all artistic, they tend to film lots of people sitting around being miserable, and then throw in a completely naked woman (or an erection). Back in France in 1949, this wasn't an option, so Jean Cocteau decided, oh hell, why don't I make a film about immortality, death, poetry, the eternal power of love and put lots of gorgeous French people in it.

Seems reasonable.

There are levels on which 'Orphee' seems ever so slightly daft, ever so slightly silly. Go into it with the wrong frame of mind, and all you'll get is confused. Go into it with the right frame of mind, and you'll still be confused. And you'll love it.

Orpheus (Jean Marais) is a poet, his career gradually being eclipsed by a younger man (Edouard Dermithe). He becomes intrigued and seduced by Death, who takes the form of a princess (Maria Casares), who has in turn fallen in love with him. But when Death's henchmen kill Orpheus' wife Eurydice (Maria Dea), Orpheus descends into the underworld to save her.

Yeah, I've those kind of weekends too. What everyone remembers about this movie is probably the stunning effects and images - Orpheus entering the underworld through a mirror (an effect achieved using glass and mercury, every bit as good as the CGI bits in 'The Matrix' which are an homage to this movie), the hell's angels zooming around the French countryside in black leather on motorbikes, the close-ups of gorgeous agonised faces - but the really impressive thing is the way that Cocteau manages to play out his fantasy in a world which reflects reality.

This is post-war France as much as it is anywhere, bombed, battered, looking around for answers to the meaning of it all. Death's henchmen recall the uniformed Nazis, the way in which Orpheus is being margina
lised and persecuted suggests the uncertainty and paranoia of an occupied nation. Even my favourite bit, when bizarre poetic messages come over the radio ('L'oiseau compte avec ses doights' i.e. the bird counts with its fingers) are actually inspired by the coded messages the resistance used to supply to the BBC. Even more bizarre is the way in which the film is allegedly autobiographical, with Orpheus representing Cocteau as the celebrity poet being rejected by the kids.

So while the film seems completely dreamlike, detatched from the real world, it's actually locked tightly into reality, retaining a connection to it despite its enormous flights of fancy. Even as Orpheus descends into the underworld, when the film seems to travel inside Cocteau's imagination, there is still a relationship to something solid. And in the end, what Cocteau seeks to celebrate, even fetishize, is that oldest of ideas, that least surreal of concepts - the power of love. While David Lynch (the director who got me into the mess of reviewing this film in the first place) is sometimes disappearing up a surreal blind alley, just seeing how bonkers he can get before his backers stop giving him money, Cocteau has a pretty familiar story on his mind - love is everything, worth any sacrifice.

I'm torn about whether this is Cocteau's best film - after all, you haven't lived until you have seen his stunning version of Beauty and the Beast (called, predictably 'La Belle et La Bete') - but 'Orphee' is a blast, a sublime and beautifully made piece of madness which sucks you and never lets you go. There's even a sequel 'La Testament d'Orphee', but it goes off its trolley pretty rapidly, and never captures the atmosphere of this one.

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