Film Review
In his final film, Jean Cocteau, France's greatest living poet,
provides a fitting conclusion to a remarkable artistic career that
spanned over fifty years and encompassed not only the cinema but also
painting, novels, stage plays, music and poems. As the title
suggests,
Le Testament
d'Orphée revisits Cocteau's previous (and arguably most
inspired) film,
Orphée, based on the
Orpheus legend of Greek antiquity. Now it is Cocteau himself,
near to death, who must venture into the Underworld (represented here
as a bare studio set) to face a celestial court, embodied by two of his
own creations, superbly portrayed by María Casares and
François Périer (recreating their memorable roles from
Orphée). What is
Cocteau's crime? To be a poet, to dare to allow his mind to stray
into places no mortal must visit, in an attempt to extract meaning from
the barren confusion of existence.
The film completes the so-called Orphic trilogy which began with
Cocteau's first cinematic offering,
Le Sang d'un poète
(1930). That film, a surreal oddity which never fails to
impress with its visual inventiveness, was an attempt to convey the
spiritual torment of an artist who is torn between his creative
impulses, which forever seek to steal shards of light from the Divine
and refashion these in ways that are accessible to the human heart, and
the limits of his powers of expression. This theme is further
developed in Cocteau's subsequent
Orphée
(1949), in which a poet (played by the director's lover at the time,
Jean Marais) becomes fascinated by death and undertakes a bizarre
pilgrimage to the Underworld, a scenario that Cocteau replays in his
final film, accompanied by his adopted son and youthful companion,
Edouard Dermithe.
Le Testament d'Orphée
is the least regarded and least understood of Cocteau's films but it is
the one that perhaps reveals most about Jean Cocteau, not just his
passion for art in all its various manifestations and his life-long
affinity for ancient Greek culture but also his colourful
personality. It is a film that brims with self-mocking humour and
Cocteau allows himself the indulgence of including many of his friends
in it. Yul Brynner, a close friend of Cocteau who helped to
finance the film, is well-chosen to play the imposing lackey who guides
the poet to his final resting place. The artist Pablo Picasso and
famous matador Luis Dominguin both crop up, along with Charles Aznavour
and Nicole Courcel. 15-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud,
French cinema's latest star, also puts in an appearance, thanks to his
mentor François Truffaut, a great admirer of
Cocteau. It was Truffaut who encouraged Cocteau to make the
film, putting up some of the funds with the prize money he won at the
Cannes Film Festival in 1959 for his debut film
Les Quatre cents coups.
Whilst it was strongly defended in some quarters (notably by Truffaut,
who adored it),
Le Testament
d'Orphée was generally ill-received when it was first
released in 1960. As he became increasingly eccentric in his
declining years the intelligentsia no longer took Cocteau seriously,
and his final film was dismissed by many as a self-indulgent vanity
project. Today, fifty years on from Cocteau's death, the film is
held in somewhat higher esteem, perhaps not as great as his previous
cinematic triumphs, but a satisfying and humorous coda to his immense
artistic career. Through some imaginative cinematic trickery
Cocteau indulges in plenty of metaphysical mischief in his quest to
unpick the mysteries of existence, leaving us in awe not only of his
creative genius but also his unerring ability to take us outside
ourselves and connect us with the Divine, by shedding that which was
most precious to him, the blood of the poet.
© James Travers 2013
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Next Jean Cocteau film:
Le Sang d'un poète (1930)
Film Synopsis
A poet from the 18th century somehow manages to lose himself in time
and ends up two hundred years in the future. Here he searches for
a professor who alone can end his torment, piercing him with a special
temporal bullet that allows him to reborn in the world. The poet
follows a man dressed as a black horse to a gypsy camp where he comes
across a burning photograph of Cégeste, one of the characters in
his film
Orphée.
Having torn the photograph to pieces, the poet throws them into the
sea, from which Cégeste suddenly springs. Cégeste
guides the poet on his final journey, taking him to a court where he is
interrogated by another two of his creations, the Death Princess and
Heurtebise. Having been found guilty of innocence and condemned
to life, the poet is taken to the gates of eternity, where he must
await his judgement...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.