Black Orpheus
Director:
Marcel Camus
Distributed by:
Lopert Pictures
Released:
June 1959
Country:
Brazil
Brazil’s
only winner of the Best Foreign Film award looks, sounds, and feels like you
would think a movie set in Rio would look, sound, and feel. Not that I know much about Brazil or about
movies about Brazil. If you pressed me,
I can think of only two films with Brazil as a setting: The
Boys from Brazil from 1978 and Blame
in on Rio from 1984, both which I watched while still in high school. The Boy
from Brazil seemed cool because it was about uncovering a plot to clone a
bunch of Hitlers using der Fuehrer’s
DNA. Blame
it on Rio, which was one of those films I caught on HBO without my parents
knowing it, was even cooler since it featured the bare breasts of actress
Michelle Johnson. Neither movie, in
fact, is really very good, but both attracted the sensibilities of the
17-year-old I was at the time.
The
Best Foreign Film from 1959 is a very different movie from either of these two
films, but it is one that is meant to appeal to a certain sensibility, one that
could not be further from that of 17-year-old Me. Black
Orpheus isn’t a musical, per se, in that the characters don’t sing their
lines to each other, but music is at the center of it. Specifically, it’s a film that incorporates
the music and emotions of the Brazilian Carnival, that country’s version of
Mardi Gras, with the dancing and costumes of the annual festival.
 |
| Orfeu wooing Eurydice |
The
story is simple and based on the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Don't worry, I had never heard of it either. Orfeu is a trolley conductor and we are
introduced to him when he gives Eurydice, a girl from out of town visiting her
cousin, a ride. Orfeu hits on Eurydice bigtime
from the beginning, even though he is engaged to another girl, the somewhat
possessive Mira. We don’t know it at
first, but Eurydice has fled her home town to avoid this strange stalker who
dresses in a skeleton costume and won’t leave her alone. Eurydice sees this guy as Death and doesn’t want
him to catch up with her; Orfeu starts to see Mira as someone he would like to
avoid. The question the plot poses is
whether Orfeu and Eurydice will ever get together.
 |
| Jealous Mira |
Orfeu
has one special talent—he plays the guitar like nobody’s business, and his
musical skills are what he intends to use to get the girl. Through the first two thirds of the film
there is singing and dancing, all in the music of the Carnival. It’s toward the end this film gets a little
weird, with less about a potential romance and more about the skeletal Death
character breaking it up. I won’t give
the end of the thin plot away, but if you want to Google the Greek legend you’ll
see how it all ends.
All
but one character are played by non-actors, and it shows. The guy who plays Orfeu, Breno Mello, was a Brazilian
soccer player, and his singing is dubbed.
The other main characters are cartoonish and over-the-top, like one might
expect in a musical. The film was
renowned for its cinematography, which I suppose may have dazzled some folks in
the time before everyone had a color TV in their homes and which probably
showed up better on a 1959 theater screen than from the DVD I watched this
from.
In
short, this is one of those films that I didn’t quite connect with, but I can
say wasn’t without its
charms. Again,
not a true musical, the tone and story reminded me just a little of one of
those American musicals from the 50’s that I don’t care all that much for
either. I wasn’t much for it, but had
there been some cloning or bare breasts, I might have been a bit more
enthusiastic about it.
 |
| Michelle Johnson couldn't act either, but Michael Caine didn't seem to care |
The Title:
Orfeu Negro. It’s an adaptation of a story about Orpheus,
only this guy’s black. Get it? Black Orpheus?
The culture:
The spectacle of the Brazilian Carnival is central to the film. Like Mardi
Gras, there is a large dose of paganism that mingles with the Catholic
origins. Voodoo and superstition dominate
the culture in a way that seems almost pejorative to Brazil.
Agenda danger:
Barack Obama discusses his mother’s love for this film in his book Dreams of My Father. Apparently, her feelings were off-putting and
embarrassing for him because he saw this movie as patronizing. He said, “I suddenly realized that the
depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen, the reverse image
of Conrad's dark savages, was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all
those years before.” Watching it with
her, he thought he saw in her what attracted her to his father, an affinity to
for the exotic and forbidden. Whatever.
Best Picture that year:
Ben Hur.
