Orpheus (1950)

I have tried to get clear about the reasons for Jean Cocteau's Orpheus being a cinematic classic. I can't say that I have ever been a fan of the so called poetic realism. Orpheus did nothing to convince me of the originality or insight of that movement - and well, to be honest, it is more surrealism than realism, so maybe it's wrong to link it to that school anyway.

On paper, its oscillation between the ordinary and the dreamy sounds extra-ordinary. It could work. The actual film is, in my opinion, rather clumsy and even drearily pretentious at times. There are a few stunning scenes that could have been developed into something spectacular, but that never happened. In fact, there is an enchanting scene in which we see the central characters gliding through the rooms of the Underworld. Instead we have a lot of heavy-handed Mythological references that never quite make it into dynamic cinematic expression.

The film is based on the Greek myth about Orpheus, that guy who tried to save himself and his wife from the underworld. The updated version takes us to the cool corners of Paris, a quotidian marriage and, well you know, a love fling with Death. Orpheus reels from love triangle (or love square?) to mythical story to a meditation on the strange conditions of art and artistic inspiration. I guess Cocteau tried to say something about all of these things, but for me, the film is so unfocused that it succeeds in none of these specific respects.

At best, the film is a critique of art. The main character, an older poet, ends up in the underworld after an encounter with a younger man in a brawl - and then Death herself comes along and drives them into the land of mirrors and shadows in her Rolls-Royce. After returning to his home and his wife Eurydice, the poet is enchanted by a series of radio-transmissions, white noise. He sits listening to that in his car, mesmerized an unable to get out of his secluded world. Death, rather than Eurydice, present the stronger artistic or erotic possibility. - But too much is thrown into the film in order for this critique to gain any serious weight.