Black Orpheus

The bossa nova sounds of Antonio Carlos fill the soundtrack in the opening scenes of 1959's BLACK ORPHEUS.  Dancers cascade across the frame.  We're in Rio de Janeiro.  The annual Carnival festival is a day away, but life seems to be filled with color and rhythm at all times.  I read an online criticism that dismissed director Marcel Camus' "foreign, exoticized gaze", a take that feels utter fantastical.  This did not affect my appreciation, and it all seemed appropriate as the film takes the Greek legend of Oprheus and Eurydice and sets it in this vibrant, yet economically depressed locale.  A place where people will ask for more credit at the local grocery because they spent all their money on some frilly costume, or complain they can't afford a wedding ring because they have to get their beloved guitar back from the pawn shop.

Forgive me; I'm taking a realist approach to a film that is obviously fashioned in the mythological style of its source material, and the play Ofeu da Conceicao by Vinicius de Moraes.  Maybe I've been irrevocably influenced by favela dramas like PIXOTE and CITY OF GOD.

Orfeu (Breno Mello) is a local playboy who is about to be roped into marriage by the aggressive Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira).  One day Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) arrives in town to visit her cousin Serafina (Lea Garcia).  Orfeu, on whom's trolley she rides, is immediately smitten.  But a guy dressed in a skeleton costume - who may be Death itself - looms in the background.  The same figure Eurydice left home to escape.  Meanwhile, the city keeps on partying. And partying some more.  Samba dance sequences, even before we get to Carnival, are numerous and go on perhaps too long, just about to the point of monotony.  Don't get me wrong, I find the choreography to be energetic and highly cinematic, but maybe if viewers imbibe copious amounts of Cachaca and try to mimic the moves they see onscreen, it will feel less of a meander.

The first two acts of BLACK ORPHEUS are fairly lighthearted.  Time is spent with Serafina and her boyfriend Chico (Waldemar De Souza), largely comical.  Their flirting, and some of the moments between Orfeu and Eurydice, are far more risque than you'd typically see in a Hollywood picture of this time period. Camus achieves a relaxed, sexy vibe among these earthy yet mythological characters.  But the original story was a tragedy, and BLACK ORPHEUS follows suit in the final half hour.  The tone shift felt abrupt to me.  The scene with the janitor and the "Missing Persons Bureau" office, while interesting, felt like it belonged in another movie.  Likewise for the follow up scene in a church, in which black magic type rituals are performed.

But Camus' film is a mostly quite lively, eye filling affair.  His direction is fabulous, even if certain scenes otherwise are not.   The music proved popular enough to inspire a craze in the U.S.  It is the capture of the undoubtedly heavily romanticized world of Rio, very strikingly photographed by Jean Bourgoin, and its music that makes this movie sing.