Cinema: Brown Orpheus

Dragon Sky. Lady Luck, like most females, needs to feel needed. When Marcel Camus, a middle-aged Frenchman whose first movie had flopped, laid his last sou and two years of his life on the line for a far-out film about the slums of Rio de Janeiro, the lady smiled on every scene he shot—Black Orpheus is a cinemusical masterpiece. But when he lazily decided to remake the same movie in the slums and ruins of Cambodia, the lady gave him a sharp slap in the face—Dragon Sky is just an interesting failure.

At first it’s hard to see why. The story, in which two star-crossed lovers relive an old Cambodian legend, is almost the same as the story of Orpheus. The lovers themselves (Sam El and Narie Hem) are even more beautiful than the lovers in the earlier film—they look like oriental deities sculptured in living flesh. The color is rich and sensuous, and the camera catches dim disturbing glimpses of Angkor Wat, the great stone temple that lies sleeping in the jungles of Cambodia like a monstrous unimaginable spider.

Nevertheless, as the story unfolds the beauty becomes a bit boring, the sense of déjà vu insists, the characters swell into symbols, the symbols dissolve into words and the words fall on the ear with a soft, fruity thud. “I have waited so long.” “I have searched so long.” “One cannot choose in life, my son.”

One can choose to see only the first half of this film.