In praise of Orphée – Jean Cocteau’s mould-break­ing masterpiece

In Orphée, Death rides in a Rolls Royce, served by leather clad bik­ers; she broad­casts on radio and pub­lish­es lit­er­ary mag­a­zines. Jean Cocteau’s bizarre, dream­like, extreme­ly fun­ny and dar­ing­ly exper­i­men­tal work took the Venice Film Fes­ti­val by storm in 1950, and was so pop­u­lar with audi­ences upon release that one Ger­man cin­e­ma showed it every Sat­ur­day night for the next 15 years. It con­tin­ues to influ­ence film­mak­ers today, with the BFI pre­pares releas­ing a new remas­tered ver­sion into cinemas.

In 2004 the crit­ic David Thomp­son wrote that The Matrix could not have been made with­out Orphée – and you could now add to that list Incep­tion, Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind, Pan’s Labyrinth and even Netflix’s recent series Stranger Things and Mani­ac. Film­mak­ers Chris Mark­er and Andrei Tarkovsky, in their own eras, both admired the film huge­ly for its bold retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eury­dice, in which a poet sets off on a jour­ney into the under­world in search of his dead wife.

Cocteau’s mas­ter­stroke was to find the con­tem­po­rary cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage for this age-old myth – his under­world exists in the archi­tec­tur­al nooks and cran­nies of the real, entered and exit­ed through mir­rors (filmed using pools of mer­cury). In this ​‘zone’ grav­i­ty can be upend­ed at a moment’s notice, and peo­ple either glide around with ease or strug­gle as though mov­ing through trea­cle. ​“The laws of the oth­er world,” declares one char­ac­ter, ​“are dif­fer­ent to ours.”

Cocteau’s film – which lib­er­al­ly uses neg­a­tive effects, rewind­ing, weird cuts and cam­era angles – is as much about the joy­ous­ly break­able laws of cin­e­ma as it is about the myth­i­cal under­world. Tarkovsky’s Stalk­er, which breaks into colour from black-and-white as soon as its char­ac­ters enter its mys­te­ri­ous ​‘zone’, owes much to Cocteau’s sensibility.

Like Tarkovsky’s zone, Cocteau’s spir­it world also has a very mod­ern psy­cho­log­i­cal dimen­sion: it is not just a land of the dead but ​“a place of men’s mem­o­ries and the ruins of their habits”. In Mani­ac (as in Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind) Emma Stone and Jon­ah Hill have to go on the run through the col­laps­ing archi­tec­ture of their own minds and mem­o­ries. Like­wise Cocteau’s Orphée (played by his lover and long-term part­ner, the age­ing but still rugged­ly hand­some Jean Marais) is engaged in a bat­tle not just with Death but with his own mem­o­ries of an impos­si­ble love; he can only win through uneasy for­get­ful­ness and oblivion.

Oth­er details blur the lines fur­ther between psy­chol­o­gy, tech­nol­o­gy and mag­ic. Through­out the film radio sets sud­den­ly start declaim­ing frag­ments of sur­re­al­ist poet­ry that Orphée des­per­ate­ly scrib­bles down – whether they are com­ing from his own sub­con­scious, or from the spir­it world, is unclear.

The dis­em­bod­ied voic­es over the radio are anoth­er part of Cocteau’s influ­en­tial vision. As with the Nokia phones and blink­ing green com­put­er screens of The Matrix, Orphée’s super­nat­ur­al fan­tasies take place via the nor­mal tech­nol­o­gy of mod­ern life, mak­ing it seem all the more eeri­ly plau­si­ble. Just as many a child­hood in the 2000s was spent wait­ing for com­put­er screens to spell out the words ​‘fol­low the white rab­bit’, after watch­ing Orphée mir­rors begin to seem like ​‘the doors through which Death pass­es’, poten­tial gate­ways to anoth­er world.

The film has its uneven points – Cocteau is cer­tain­ly more inter­est­ed in his notions of sym­bol­ic and poet­ic won­der than he is in human rela­tion­ships – and there are plen­ty of high­ly con­ven­tion­al moments of egre­gious and dis­turb­ing sex­ism. For its cin­e­mat­ic inven­tive­ness and far-reach­ing influ­ence, how­ev­er, it is des­tined to con­tin­ue find­ing new audiences.