Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro)

What can I say about Black Orpheus, a film that upon its release in 1959 won the Oscar, the Palm D’or, and the Golden Globe and is credited with popularizing the bossa nova in the industrialized world.

Before the world heard Astrud Gilberto’s whispy voice, before they knew of Stan Getz’ velvety sax, they saw Black Orpheus. The film (in Portuguese, Orfeu Negro) put a face on a new style of samba that was fresh, romantic and very accessible to jazz hipsters.

Not much that hasn’t been said better already. Just that the film is eye and ear candy. The shots of the cliffs surrounding Rio, the scenes from Carnival, in spite of the tragic nature of the mythic framework, it all adds up to a celebration of life and sexuality that is especially refreshing after watching the dark melodrama of Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution.

There is little approaching evil in this movie. Mira, Orfeo’s jilted fiancee, tries to murder Eurydice for stealing her man, but her anger is bright and out there and some would say she had cause. Anyway, as Wesley Morris writes in the Boston Globe:

One problem with the romantic tragedy, historically speaking, was that you couldn’t dance to it. In 1959, that changed. Marcel Camus delighted the world with “Black Orpheus,” which relocated the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro just in time for Carnival.

…

Indeed, the Orpheus of Greek myth tamed the masses with his lyre. For Camus’s purposes, he’s Orfeo, a streetcar driver (Breno Mello) who can seduce crowds with his guitar and the gentle rhythms of bossa nova. He’s also a wicked dancer, with moves that wouldn’t be out of place in the center forward position (Mello was a soccer star in his day). Orfeo is also something of a cad. Women swoon wherever he goes. But he’s engaged to Mira (Lourdes De Oliveira), a feisty whirlwind and sexpot who always seems to forget how angry she is when the opportunity to dance presents itself.

It should also be pointed out that Orfeo can play the sun out of bed with his guitar, or so the local children believe. Thus is set up his role as a force of rebirth, as part of the cyclical nature of life and death.

Death lurks around the edges, pursuing Eurydice, but Death is a natural fact not an evil force and this one moves so beautifully that he’s a joy to watch. Spider Man should have such moves.

Lawrence Russell, writing at Culture Court, says that Black Orpheus achieves what Orson Welles rather infamously tried when he went to Rio in 1942 and spent gobs of money trying to document Carnival on film.

It was around 1930 before the Brazilian authorities allowed samba music to be part of the Rio Carnival. Long outlawed as a dangerous expression of black slave culture, it eventually gained legitimacy as a community recreation in the form of Samba Schools, who competed for prizes at festivals.

Our Orfeo is “king” of one of these samba schools, the Babilonia School, and the whole film takes place in the context of preparation for the competition. Continuing with Russell:

The samba gained attention in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere with the highly popular 1934 Hollywood film Flying Down To Rio and later at the 1939 World Fair in New York, where the Brazilian Pavilion featured a samba orchestra and dancers. This in turn created a fad for the exciting 2/4 dance music on Broadway and inspired Orson Welles to visit Rio in 1942 and attempt a movie set in the Carnival. This movie was never completed, in part because Welles ran afoul the local authorities when he went into the surrounding hill communities in order to film a voodoo ceremony as part of the origin of the samba.

Without doubt, Black Orpheus achieves anything Welles was trying for and probably goes well beyond it. For a start, [the French director] Marcel Camus had a script to work from whereas Welles was trying to wing it on the spot. Also, by the late fifties the advances in camera and film technology allowed Camus a far easier mobility. The comparison is merely for historical purposes, however, as Welles was attempting a documentary (with certain fictional aspects) whereas Black Orpheus is pure drama.

So, in the end, the lovers die.

Eurydice is taken by Death. The underworld that Orfeo visits to reclaim her is the voodoo ceremony that Welles wasn’t allowed to film. Again, Lawrence Russell:

Here, under the direction of the witchdoctor (who is smoking a cigar), the samba is in its most elementary form, a raw cacophony of primitive drumming, clapping, chanting… and the droning cries of the dancers who stagger on the edge of the astral plane, seeking possession and reincarnation.

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The orgiastic aspects of voodoo — sex and the torture of animals — are what relegate “the old religion” to the shadows of the occult. Yet as a source of the samba and the hypnogogic function of dance, the ancient rituals embrace both pagan and Christian cosmogonies and anticipate certain procedures in psychotherapy.

An old woman in the ceremony channels Eurydice but Orfeo fails at or rejects this method of reviving his love. He looks behind him and sees, not his beautiful Eurydice, but a plain old woman in a voodoo trance. He flees this underworld in grief.

The original Orpheus was ripped to death by Maenads for forsaking the love of women after Eurydice’s death. Our Orfeo, returning home carrying the dead Eurydice in his arms, is driven backwards over a cliff by a sort of mob of excited women led by the angry Mira. Life is always lived on the edge if you are poor in Rio. As Lawrence Russell says:

Beautifully photographed and edited, with a lot of the action on the cliffs, Rio is always an ethereal tableaux in the background, its beauty tempered by our visual anxiety of the precipice, the lurking vertigo, as if these frolicking sambistas are always just two or three wrong steps from disaster… like our involuntary falls into the chasms within our dreams.

So Orpheus and Eurydice die and our final view of them is lying in a beautiful sprawl in one another’s arms at the base of the cliff.

But it’s all no matter. There will always be another Orpheus and so another Eurydice. Some one must make the sun come up with their love song, a bossa nova played on the guitar. Here is the final scene of the film:

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