Coorabell Hall Film Club
Wednesday 3 September

Food & drinks (Licensed) from 6.00PM
Movie starts at 7.30PM

Orphee (Orpheus - 1950)

The Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the Underworld has been told and retold hundreds of times in novels, poetry, theatre, film, opera, music, ballet and even video games. The musical Hadestown is currently playing in Australia.

Jean Cocteau’s masterful reworking of the myth includes multiple layers of strangeness and rapture. The setting would appear to be postwar France. Orphée is a celebrated poet – sufficiently celebrated, in fact, to be at one stage surrounded by excitable young autograph hunters who might otherwise be entranced by the burgeoning pop culture. Orphée witnesses a noted younger poet being killed by a couple of bikers after a brawl: this is Cégeste who is spirited away by the elegant Princess Death in her chauffeured car, and she insists Orphée accompany her.

After an interlude in the underworld, Orphée returns but has to make a journey back when his wife Eurydice is killed and he is allowed to revisit the netherworld to recover her – on condition, of course, that he never looks back at her – in the company of the Princess’s driver Heurtebise, who is in love with Eurydice; but Death herself is in love with Orphée, and the feeling is not merely reciprocated, but may be his real motive in undertaking this existentially perilous journey to defeat mortality. It is a kind of sexual conquest, but Death must make a tragic or heroic act of self-denial to protect Orphée’s immortality as a poet.

There is something weirdly brilliant in the low-tech special effects: the back-projections, the film run in reverse, the mirror-surfaces that become rippling vertical pools: “Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes; look long enough in a mirror and you will see Death at work.” This film wonders what might happen if Orpheus did in fact manage to get his loved one home, despite the not-looking back rule. The outcome is pure drawing room comedy and absurdity, yet there is a flash of pure terror when he finally sees her face in the car’s wing-mirror.

Orpheus is Jean Cocteau's most acclaimed cinematic work that won the International Film Critics Award at the 1950 Venice Film Festival.