Cinema: Imports

5 minute read
TIME

Orpheus (Paulvé; Discina), Avant-Gardist Jean Cocteau’s latest plunge through the lookingglass, carries him into an enigmatic dream world that blends myth, realistic thriller and fantasy. Laureled in Venice, praised and damned in Paris and London, it is a film to frustrate any moviegoer who demands a logical explanation of what he is looking at. For those willing to drift with Cocteau’s reverie, catching what wisps of meaning they can, the movie is an interesting experience.

Borrowing from his one-act play, Orpheus (1926) and his surrealist film, Blood of a Poet (1933), Jack-of-All-Arts Cocteau has written and directed a modern version of the legend in which Orpheus charms the gods into returning his dead wife, Eurydice, to life. As Cocteau has it, Orpheus (Jean Marais) is a celebrated poet and national hero who falls in love with a satellite of death in the shape of a beautiful princess (Maria Casares). The princess covets Orpheus, takes Eurydice (Maria Dea) before her time. Confused by his love for both women, the poet journeys to the netherworld to plead for his wife’s return—and in the hope of seeing the princess again.

In Cocteau’s up-to-date mythology, death’s handmaiden rides in a Rolls-Royce, flanked by grim motorcyclists, and communicates with Orpheus by shortwave radio. Her immediate superiors in the beyond—a bombed-out no man’s land between the living and the dead—are a trio of business-suited bureaucrats in a chain of command that goes on into infinity. The role of the avenging Bacchantes, who tore Orpheus apart in the ancient myth, is now taken by a seedy bunch of envious poets who gather in what looks like Paris’ Café de Flore. When characters shuttle between this life and the next, they glide through mirrors—Cocteau’s favorite symbol of the doorway to death (“Look at yourself in a mirror all your life, and you will see death at work like bees in a hive of glass”).

What does it all mean? “Don’t try to understand,” the princess tells one of her victims, and Cocteau echoes her in an “explanation” that is not much more enlightening than his movie. Orpheus is no allegory, he says, but simply an attempt to touch entertainingly in film metaphor on a scrambled collection of such themes as free will, inspiration and the poet’s preoccupation with death. What the movie does with these themes is as elusive and disjointed as a half-remembered dream.

Poet Cocteau is nonetheless a clever, imaginative dreamer and a skilled film craftsman. With the help of Georges Auric’s brilliantly appropriate music and some talented, attractive players, his movie never fails to be dramatic and provocative, or to keep the audience guessing just what will happen next. Those who try to get to the bottom of it all may conclude that Cocteau’s waters are not so deep as they are muddy, but the ripples are something to see.

Ways of Love [Joseph Burstyn] applies the packaging technique of Quartet to a trio of short fiction films made separately at different times by three of Europe’s top directors. Each story illustrates a different meaning of love: the kind that stirs the mating urge, the peasant’s love of his land, the heights of religious passion. Each also serves to illustrate, with varying success, the characteristic styles of Italy’s Roberto (Open City) Rossellini and France’s Jean (Grand Illusion) Renoir and Marcel (The Baker’s Wife) Pagnol. None of the films could conceivably have been made in Hollywood.

¶ A Day in the Country is Renoir’s bitter-sweet version (filmed in 1936) of a De Maupassant short story about a romantic brief encounter and its melancholy aftermath. The director puts plenty of feeling into his pastoral atmosphere, and his love scenes catch fire. However, the script is poorly constructed, much of the comedy seems forced, and the picture’s mooning romanticism finally cloys.

¶ Jofroi, a prewar Pagnol comedy based on a story by Jean Giono, proves the brightest thing in the package. Jofroi (well played by Vincent Scotto) is a hidebound old peasant, suspicious, ignorant and proud. The old man sells his orchard to his neighbor, Fonse (Henri Poupon), then pulls a gun when he sees Fonse uprooting precious trees. When the village priest forces a compromise that will give Fonse the orchard after Jofroi dies, the old man announces that he will commit suicide to put his death on Fonse’s conscience. After some 30 suicide attempts, he intimidates Fonse into a sickbed. Though Pagnol’s film technique is static, his grasp of character and locale makes for a human film that is, by turns, uproarious and more than a little touching.

¶ The Miracle (1948), Rossellini’s last movie with Anna Magnani, is a curiously spotty film with an impressive performance by its fiery star and glimpses of the director at his raw, powerful best. It tells of a demented peasant woman who mistakes a strange passerby for a vision of St. Joseph. He sits silently while she babbles and drinks his wine until she falls into a stupor. When she finds herself pregnant, she is fanatically certain that she has been chosen for a holy birth. Scorned and humiliated by the villagers, thrown out of her cliff-dwelling by a grotesque beggar, she climbs into the mountains, where she bears her child alone in vivid pain and religious exaltation. Despite his apparent sincerity, some may question Rossellini’s taste. But parts of his film look as frighteningly real as anything he has done.

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