ORPHEE (69)

Directed by: Jean Cocteau (1949)

Starring: Jean Marais, Maria Casares, Francois Perier

The Pitch: The poet Orpheus falls in love with Death, in the guise of a mysterious princess, and tries to follow her into the Underworld.

Theo Sez: A famous fantasy, starting to creak a little now - partly because some of its images (the black-garbed, quasi-Fascist motorcyclists, or the path to the Underworld as a walk through a bombed-out city) hark back to the War, and have lost some of their potency, and partly because it's dreamier than we expect fantasy to be nowadays (after half a century of sci-fi), smooth and lulling instead of strange and spiky. The ambience is that of a Parisian intellectuals' cafe (which is where the first scenes are set), suffused with a rather idle wit - elegant symbolism and airy flights of fancy, dreamed up (you feel) between sips of absinthe for the amusement of the film-maker and his friends : for such a personal film (Orpheus being, of course, Cocteau himself, an ageing literary lion seeking always to revitalise his work, his mantra - like his hero's - being "Etonnez-nous", "Astonish us"), there's a surprisingly detached feel to it - a result perhaps of its explicit (and successful) intention to create something "timeless". Much of it remains wonderful cinema, above all the eerie slow-motion journey through the ruins towards the realm of Death - all you can really grumble about is a slight over-abstract quality, a certain tentativeness about actually doing something with its dazzling fragments. As someone puts it, "The role of the dreamer is [simply?] to accept his dreams."