ORFEU: A Shimmering Journey from the Heights to the Depths.
Written: Aug 24 '00 (Updated Mar 29 '06)
Product Rating:
Pros: Great Cinemascope production values, a brightly colored tragedy with poetry, singing, dancing and pageantry.
Cons: Some critics object to the stylization of abject poverty. They would prefer realism.
The Bottom Line: ORFEU: a gorgeous re-telling of "Orpheus," in which technicolor photography of Carnaval, like the City itself, vie with the story's tragic events for our attention.
Thirty years after he was forced to abandon his 1942 production of IT'S ALL TRUE ("completed" 1993), Orson Welles observed that something of what he was after in that ill-fated Technicolor project had been done by the French in BLACK ORPHEUS (Marcel Camus, 1959). The modestly produced Eastmancolor French film was an International success, and rather ironically (for such had been part of the mission given Welles by Nelson Rockefeller), put Brazilian Cinema on the map. Recently, a remake played in American theaters, which combined the two projects as ORFEU (Diegues, 1999).
The Cinemascope film, the most expensive ever made in Brazil ($7,000,000), is as controversial as it is spectacular.
Brazil for some years has been in the throes of unrest over inflation, male domination, attacks on Rio's hedonism, inflation, poverty, and the destruction of the Rain Forest for commercial gain. Some critics have condemned ORFEU as painting over these issues with gaudy, Technicolored song and dance.
When I saw the film a year ago, I could not help but think Orson Welles would have applauded its use of color, music, dance, drama and myth. And that is good enough for me. I cannot evaluate ORFEU'S script, or even its sociology, but I was impressed by its stylized art and energy.
The opening shot of a huge airliner -- a Chariot of the Gods -- gliding across the skyline of Rio at dawn, carrying Euridice (Patricia Franca) to her love and her fate, enthralled me in the film's spell. Though I do not speak Portuguese, I found myself often not bothering to read the sub-titles but allowing myself to be carried along by the action. That is a tribute to any foreign movie these days.
Euridice is a young woman from up river, who is coming to live with relatives in the favelas of the great City. Superb cut-aways to the residents (roosting like devine parrots) in the favelas introduce us to the other major characters, as she makes her descent.
Orfeu (Toni Garrido), making love to the ravishing Mira in the shadow of the Mountain, is the magical ruler of this terrible shanty town amid the wealth and natural splendor of Rio. He is a gentle, rapping poet-musician, who holds his subjects in his open hand, as he organizes them for the singing, dancing, prancing Days of Carnival on the edge of Lent. Beautiful women admire him, children cherish his words and moves, even the harshest gangsters and police respect him. They all live on the edge of a sheer drop to the jungle floor, the Underworld of our modern Myth of Orpheus, where snakes and rodents live amid the trash, garbage, and human victims of the favela, all thrown down from above.
Carlos Diegues, best known for BYE BYE BRAZIL (1979) and QUILLOMBO (1984), is himself a poet and a former film critic, and so he quite effectively weaves the Myth of Orpheus within a modern story, based, as was BLACK ORPHEUS, on the Brazilian Classic: "Orfeu da Conceicao," by Vincius De Moraes.
The original Greek Myth concerns Orpheus, son of a muse and a river god, related thematically to Osiris, Dionysus, Adam, David and Jesus; and later to Paolo and Romeo. When his wife, Eurydice, dies from a snake bite, he goes into the Underworld and charms the King and Queen there, Pluto and Persephone, into allowing him to return Eurydice to the Land of the Living. But when he looks upon her before journey's end, he violates a Law of the Gods, and he loses her. The maenads (women mad with ecstasy) mob him, tearing him to pieces. The muses gather up his parts and consign them to the river. From which, as always, comes rebirth.
The modern telling roughly follows this plot, culminating in magnificent musical color scenes of Carnival (that Welles would love) and a creepy exploration of the modern Underworld of Rio, both real and imagined.
[The film makers constructed their own photogenic favela on a site of the real ones.]
Orpheus, in his desire for Eurydice, angers Pacheco (Stepan Nercessian), leader of the gangsters; Mira (recent Playboy Playmate Isabel Fillardis), latest and most beautiful of his former girlfriends; and The Police, who enter the Quarter only heavily armed. The result is a Romeo and Juliet type tragedy.
With color widescreen cinematography by Affonso Beato, and original music by Caetano Veloso, ORFEU is a film of great and stylized beauty.
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