In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based on where my interests lead me and what’s available from my local public library.
Every now and then a film just knocks you out. Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus was such a film for me—I first saw it as a teenager and the music in particular took over my mental space to the point that I found myself scrambling here, there, and everywhere (this was before the internet) to find more music by Luiz Bonfá and Antônio Carlos Jobim and more generally any Brazilian pop composer I could find.
Watching today, I can see the bad as well as the good: the Brazil of the film is a European fantasy (it was a French-Italian-Brazilian production and director Marcel Camus was French) rather than the real thing, and there are aspects that are definitely stuck in their time* and painful to watch (all those happy dancing peasants!), but the music is real and so is the talent of the performers and the exuberance of Carnival.
The story draws on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and parallels are drawn with a trowel: there are characters are named Orfeu (Orpheus, played by Breno Mello), Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn, the only non-Brazilian among the principal cast; she was an African American dancer from Pittsburgh), and Hermes (Alexandro Constantino), plus a dog named Cerberus who guards a portal to something like the underworld. It’s set among the Afro-Brazilians living in a favela of Rio de Janeiro, a world not generally known to Americans and Europeans at the time, since treatment of Brazil in the popular media tended to stress the progressive and “successful” aspects of the country rather than the lives of the poor. To his credit, Camus was not unaware of the color barrier, and you can’t help but notice that the government officials in the film are generally white while the story takes place primarily among poor Afro-Brazilians.
Eurydice is a country girl who travels to Rio to stay with her cousin Serafina (Léa Garcia), having fled her home because she’s convinced a man is trying to kill her. Eurydice meets Orfeu because he’s the driver of the trolley she takes to Serafina’s neighborhood, and originally his interest in her is avuncular, as he’s about to get officially engaged to his girlfriend Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira), a mature beauty who’s been around the block a few times as compared with Eurydice’s guileless beauty and innocence.
It’s Carnival time, and everyone is involved: Orfeu, Mira, and Serafina are members of a samba school, and they along with many others perform during the film (which, again, is part of what I found so captivating in my youth; the good news is that this part of the film still holds up). Eurydice also joins in, wearing a veiled costume to try to hide from a man in a skeleton costume (Adhemar da Silva) who really is trying to kill her (we never learn why, but you know how the Greeks felt about people trying to escape their fate).
The myth is part of our common culture so you probably have a good idea how things work out, but the brilliance of this film is in making the story Brazilian, or at least a European version of Brazilian. The descent into hell is a long trip down a spiral staircase in a government building, Orfeu’s attempt to revive Eurydice is presented in the context of a ritual from the Afro-Brazilian religion of Macumba, and Orfeu’s musical talents are expressed by the fact that he sings and plays the guitar so well that two local boys are convinced his singing makes the sun rise.
Black Orpheus won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1959 and Best Foreign Film at the 1960 Academy Awards. It also kicked off a bossa nova craze in the United States, leading musicians from Stan Getz to Sarah Vaughan to Eydie Gormé to record bossa nova-themed albums. | Sarah Boslaugh
*A concept I first heard about in one of my favorite podcasts, “All About Agatha,” which covers the works of Agatha Christie, many of which contain passages that are even more embarrassing than anything in Black Orfeus.
Spine #: 48
Technical details: 107 min.; color. screen ratio 1.33:1; Portuguese.
Edition reviewed: Blu-ray (2 discs)
Extras: interviews with director Marcel Camus and actress Marpessa Dawn; the featurette “Revisiting Black Orpheus” with cinema scholar Robert Stam; the French feature-length documentary “Looking for ‘Black Orpheus’” by René Letzgus and Bernard Tournois; the featurette “Black Orpheus and that Bossa Nova Sound!” featuring jazz historian Gary Giddins and Brazilian author Ruy Castro; the film’s theatrical trailer, an optional English-dubbed soundtrack; and a booklet with an essay by film critic Michael Atkinson.
Fun Fact: Lead actor Breno Mello was a professional footballer recruited to be an actor by director Marcel Camus, who spotted him on the street.
Parting Thought: Is the portrayal of the Afro-Brazilians as happy and always dancing the embodiment of a nasty stereotype or simply an artistic choice along the lines of the singing auto mechanics in Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg?
