Orpheus

It's an incongruous observation:  Jean Cocteau's ambitious and classically inflected film transposing the myth of Orpheus to the modern world has something in common with Hollywood's big budget monster and superhero films:  Hollywood productions are driven by their CGI special effects -- the movies exist for the effects; something similar can be said about Cocteau's 1950 film -- the thing that most interests the director are the special effects, "trick shots" as they were called at the time.  Hollywood blockbusters devise effects from the whole cloth:  it's all green screen later sprayed with computer pixels.  Cocteau's effects are implemented using properties of the camera itself (slow-motion and reverse motion), the mirror tricks performed with empty frames and body-doubles, several shots employing eerie rear-projection (some of it either printed in negative or solarized).  Cocteau's effects seem to suggest that there is a secret world, a hidden perspective that can be accessed merely by looking at things from a slightly different angle.  Hollywood creates new, imaginary worlds; Cocteau shows us a reality that is always present but mostly concealed from us.  This concept of exploring reality from a slightly askew perspective is integral to the director's homosexuality -- the film is intensely Gay, coded in ways that make the homo-erotic subtext palpably present in just about every shot.  It is probable that Cocteau's gay sensibility liberates him to see reality from a perspective that is different in fundamental ways than that of many of his "straight" viewers.  Hence, the sense of a secret world within a world that animates this film.  

Orpheus is extremely complicated and anxious.  The film seems generated out of all sorts of concerns, both political and personal, that can't be directly stated.  Cocteau identifies with Orpheus and his plight:  the poet is famous and, therefore, misunderstood; he must defend his esthetic turf against younger interlopers who challenge his authority and, at the same time, must continuously invent something new for his adoring fans.  Cocteau was 60 when he made this film and had been seriously compromised by his problematic response to the German occupation -- he spent a lot of time paling around with people like Arno Brekker (Hitler's pet sculptor) and the aesthete (and German cultural attache) Ernst Juenger.  In fact,  Cocteau's activities during the Occupation were so questionable that he was tried, not once, but twice in the so-called post-war "Purification Trials" -- he had to submit to a tribunal alleging collaboration in the literary community and, then, to a similar Court convened to consider his wartime activities in the theater and movie industry.  Cocteau hashes out these issues in the film and, as one might expect, there's no clear or obvious way to resolves questions of this sort -- hence, the film's complexity.

At the movie's outset, we see Orpheus (Jean Marais) at the Cafe des Poetes, a literary hangout.  He's debating his fame with his publisher when a brawl ensues, arising from the appearance of his rival Casteguc, a young peacock of a poet scarcely 18 years old.  Two sinister, leather-clad motorcyclists blast through the brawl and Casteguc, Orpheus' rival, is killed.  A Rolls-Royce has appeared at the cafe driven by the chauffeur, Heutrebise.  A woman with pale features dressed all in black, the Princess as she is called, exits the car, has the dead Casteguc, put in the backseat and with Orpheus in tow departs the scene of the riot.  (Cops are now beating people up and taking them away in paddy-wagons.)  The Princess is going nowhere on earth -- a train blocks the road (it's the crossing of the Styx) and, then, the car glides through an increasingly spectral landscape to a weird-looking house in the middle of nowhere  It's a tremendously spooky and effective scene that derives ultimately from the Harker's trip to the castle in Murnau's Nosferatu..  Casteguc is revived and becomes the scary dominatrix's servant -- she leads the hapless lad away through a mirror.  Orpheus swoons and wakes up in the ravaged landscape, a limestone quarry.  The limousine driver is conveniently nearby and he drive Orpheus home to his subservient, little blonde wife.  (Cocteau was a misognyist -- the women in the film are either harpies, nags, or doormats.)  The chauffeur who is one of the living dead (he killed himself with gas due to unrequited love) becomes enamored with Eurydice, Orpheus' wife.  Orpheus himself doesn't care much about her -- she's pregnant and but he's so self-centered that he can't even hear the clues she drops about her condition.  (In a close-up, we see him treading on a knitted baby bootie that she has been making -- so much for typical male-female means of  procreation.  The poet is a solitary genius who produces life out of his mighty brain, his own male womb.)  Just after the chauffeur announces his love for Eurydice, the motorcyclist roar by and kill her.  Orpheus, in a completely unconvincing scene, mourns her loss and says that he wants the chauffeur to lead him to the "Netherworld" to recover the woman.  Heutrebise and Orpheus enter the mirror, the chauffeur leading the poet through a gloomy ruins, an anteroom to Hades, called the Zone.  (This term signifies the "occupied Zone" in France and establishes that the Underworld is a version of the German Occupation.)  The scenes in which Orpheus is led into Hades are undeniably beautiful and spectacularly shot -- it's a combination of reverse and slow motion with lyrically shadowy rear-projection of the bombed-out ruins at the St-Cyre military school.  This sequence has been widely influential -- its echoes can be seen most notably in Tarkovsky, who even appropriates the notion of "the Zone" and in films by directors such as the Wachowski brothers (now sisters) and  Christopher Nolan.  There follow several bizarre trials conducted by three nervous-looking Judges with stacks of paper in front of them.  It's revealed that the Princess is Orpheus' death, a figure sent by the Big Death who may or may not even exist.  (The Big Death either manipulates everyone's conduct according to occult Orders or, in the alternative, may be sleeping and simply dreaming the world.)  Heutrebise confesses that he loves Eurydice and has to sign a written admission of that fact.  Orpheus admits that he had mixed motives in descending into the Underworld -- perhaps, it was to encounter the tantalizing Princess who is his Death.  Ultimately, Orpheus and Eurydice are allowed to leave Hades but only on the condition that Orpheus not look upon his wife.  (This is no problem because he has no interest in her any way.)  Cocteau plays the scenes involving Orpheus and Eurydice back in what passes for the real world as a bitter domestic farce -- its intentionally comic with Eurydice hiding under tables so as not to be seen by Orpheus.  This is standard:  even Glueck, in his opera on the myth, wasn't able to keep a straight-face with respect to this aspect of the story.  Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld is explicitly comic.  And Cocteau follows this strategy -- Orpheus and the resurrected Eurydice, who is just a nuisance in the homosexual context upon which the director insists, has to be eliminated.  Orpheus catches sight of her in the rear-view mirror of the Rolls Royce and she vanishes for good.  Orpheus' enemies, including the Legion of Women, braying proto-feminists, appear -- they are enraged because the poet is thought to be responsible for the death of their favorite writer, Casteguc.  (Castegue, by the way, has been dictating poems to Orpheus over the radio in the Rolls Royce -- enigmatic utterances and numbers that resemble British coded broadcasts to the French Resistance during the War.)  Orpheus, now dead, is taken back into the Underworld, again in a spectacular sequence.  There he encounters his Death in the form of the leather-clad dominatrix Princess -- she has the tiniest cinched waist ever filmed.  She rebels against the regime of Death and says that she will make Orpheus immortal out of her love for him.  Then, she is led away by members of the regime to some unnameable torture, since she can't be killed -- she's already dead.  Orpheus is led back to the land of the living where it is revealed that the whole story was some kind of dream and that he's back in Kansas again, even in bed with his little vapid, blonde wife.

Jean Marais, who was Cocteau's lover, is so flamboyantly gay that he's funny -- he has brilliant little teeth, a jutting chin and a fantastic perm-waved hairdo.  (He looks like one of the characters in a Tom of Finland comic book.)  He's always mooning around, casting lasciviously gazes at the other male characters.  The film is set up to suggest that Orpheus will go to the Underworld to retrieve the beautiful blonde boy, Casteguc.  But this doesn't happen -- Cocteau is not willing to go that far to make the homosexual subtext actual text to the film.  Instead, Cocteau puts Eurydice in the film, but systematically devalues and derides her.  She's not Orpheus' object of affection but rather relegated to the role the love-object for the impotent second banana Heutrebise.  In fact, she's superfluous to the film and its meanings and this is obvious to the viewer.  History plays strange tricks.  From the vantage of 2020, Orpheus' travails in the Underworld have something to do with the Nazi Occupation -- the trial scenes have the queasy intensity of the interrogation sequences in Rosselini's Open City.  But, in fact, the system of repression that Cocteau represents in the film was the post-war purge of collaborators.  Cocteau uses imagery that suggests the Occupation, presumable, because to him, both the post-war Purge requiring two "purification trials" and the Nazi period were equivalent -- indeed, perhaps, for Cocteau the post-war purge was worse than anything he experienced during the Occupation.  From this vantage, now seventy years after the movie was made, the Underworld seems to be the Nazi occupation -- the post-war Purge is forgotten.  This is embodied, probably accidentally, in a scene in which the Judges of the Underworld assert that "There is no 'almost' here" and "There is no 'perhaps' here."  This sounds very much like the German "Hier gibt es kein 'Warum'" -- that is, the Concentration camp declaration:  "Here there is no 'why'."  I'm ambivalent about this film -- it's wildly intricate primarily because of subtexts that can't be explicitly announced:  Cocteau's misogyny, his homosexuality, his disdain for the post-war Purges.  Look at Bergman's The Seventh Seal and you will see that the Swede adapts the appearance of the Princess for his figure of Death.  Pictorially, the film is extraordinary and its camera tricks are, probably, its most important legacy.