Want to attend a testimonial event marking the retirement of one of film’s revered master directors? Well, you’re about forty-five years too late for this one, but you can still catch it on film in the form of Testament of Orpheus (1959).

Historical Background: Jean Cocteau’s “Orphic Trilogy” provides bookends and a centerpiece for his film career. The Blood of a Poet (1930) was Cocteau’s debut film and Testament of Orpheus (1959) his farewell to moviemaking. The latter followed a decade after Orphée (1949), which was, along with La Belle et la Bête (1946), Cocteau’s crowning achievement in the film medium. Cocteau directed only six films, since he divided his creative energies between poetry, painting, sculpting, and writing novels.

Testament of Orpheus is as much a farewell party as anything else, in which Cocteau effectively roasts himself. It is a kind of assessment of his own life as an artist and a search for the meaning of art. On the one hand, it is a rather heady intellectual journey in search of meaning, but it is all done with so much joie de vie that one rather enjoys it like a lively party. Many of Cocteau’s old friends are invited. Five of the cast members from Orphée (Jean Marais, Maria Casares, Edouard Dermit, François Perier and Henri Cremieux) are back for another turn as well as such luminaries as Pablo Picasso, Jean-Pierre Leaud, François Truffaut, Yul Brynner, Roger Vadim, Brigette Bardot, and Françoise Sagan, either in cameos or assisting in the production. Testament of Orpheus could have been grotesquely self-indulgent, but instead has a playful, joyful, and modestly self-reflective sincerity about it.

The Story: A prologue briefly recaps the ending of Orphée, in which The Princess (Maria Casares) and Heurtebise (François Perier) are headed toward “final death” (one always has to specify final death when that is what’s meant, in relation to Cocteau plots, since he was obsessed with the notion of resurrection). The plot, if one can call it such, opens with a poet (played by Cocteau himself) in 18th-century garb bouncing around the space-time continuum, intersecting with the life of a scientist at various stages of his development, from mere infant to old man. He finally encounters the scientist (Henri Cremieux) at his peak and enlists his aid in being returned to his own time. Cocteau suddenly emerges in a 1959 outfit into his own world – or, at least, his own world more or less, for it is a world between life and death in which Cocteau encounters a series of characters of his own creation from Orphée as well as an assortment of gods and goddesses of Greek mythology. Prominent among these is Cegeste, played by Edouard Dhermitte, who was also Cocteau’s adoptive son in real life. Cegeste appears, in a nifty bit of reverse photography, springing from the ocean and gliding effortlessly up to an overhanging cliff. The unfortunate Cegeste, at the end of Orphée, had been left behind and alone and now demands to know why the author left his fate unresolved. Cegeste hands Cocteau a flower, which the artist attempts to sketch, but instead involuntarily renders a drawing of himself instead. Cocteau destroys the flower in anger and, when chastised by Cegeste, delicately reconstructs it. Cegeste has come to fetch Cocteau, who must stand trial before a tribunal, which, however, is composed of only two inquisitors, The Princess and Heurtebise. Cocteau is charged with repeatedly attempting to trespass into another world (through poetry). Cocteau is given the minimum sentence – life, which at his age will likely to a short sentence indeed. Cocteau must then present his art, in the form of the flower, to the goddess Athena. This entails a prolonged bureaucratic wait before a doorman (Yul Brenner) and some business with a couple of centaurs and an archer goddess. Cocteau is shot clean through and killed by the goddess but is then duly resurrected amidst the mournful attendants to continue his artist’s journey through time and space.

Themes: Testament of Orpheus is an intellectual mediation on the nature of art and the relationship between the artist and his work. Quite honestly, it would not be very interesting as such, were it not for the delightful arsenal of images that Cocteau manufacturers to enliven and embellish a rather dry premise.

Production Values: What makes this film worthwhile is the unfettered creativity of Cocteau’s images. There is a lot of use of one of film’s oldest tricks – reversal of images. This allows a flower to be recomposed, water vapor to reform as a bubble, a man to leap out of the ocean to a cliff, the ashes of a photograph to reassemble out of the fire into the intact piece, and a chalk drawing to be un-erased onto a blackboard. There is a solitary color scene, highlighting a rose and a pool of blood, amidst the otherwise black-and-white film. We see parody of Cocteau’s own previous work when a pair of motorcycle cops show up near the end but turn out to be merely what they appear to be – traffic cops. We see a rich assortment of Cocteau’s highly imaginative paintings. We are shown a mock quiz show in which the young female contestant brilliantly answers questions pertaining to Greek mythology, but, when asked who Jean Cocteau is, suggest that he is a musician who plays “the buffoon.” There’s a rich assortment of mythological images and references and some startling use of surrealism. That all of this was accomplished prior to the advent of high-tech special effects speaks volumes for Cocteau’s creativity.

Bottom-Line: As I suggested earlier, this film is pretty much a farewell party for Cocteau and, as such, your enjoyment will depend largely on how well you know the man and admired his work to begin with. I don’t recommend seeing this film until you’ve seen, at least, Orphée and, better still, La Belle et la Bête as well. Testament of Orpheus is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 80 minutes. The Criterion DVD is included in a special boxed set called the “Orphic Trilogy” along with The Blood of a Poet (1930) and Orphée. The quality of the reconstructions by Criterion are superlative for the two more recent films of the trilogy but The Blood of a Poet suffers from poor image quality. Given Criterion’s impeccable reputation, one has to assume that the shortcomings relating to The Blood of a Poet are due to the limitations in the quality of source material available. This special Cocteau set is loaded with extras, including a 1984 autobiographical documentary by Cocteau, writings by Cocteau on all three films, and a color short by Cocteau called Villa Santo Sospir shot in 16 mm film.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older