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The clarion call ("Étonnez-nous!") is uttered on the sidewalk of the Café des Poètes, nothing less than a new mythology will impress Parisian Bohemia. (La Dolce Vita is at once foreglimpsed, so is A Bucket of Blood.) The titular bard (Jean Marais) is celebrated but blocked, his younger rival (Édouard Dermit) drops by only to be run over, witness and corpse climb into the mysterious Rolls-Royce. Suddenly the world switches to negative stock through a windshield, leather-clad bikers escort the Princess (María Casares) to her chalet. "Are you sleepwalking?" "I must be." The chauffeur (François Périer) drives this irritated Orpheus back to his pregnant Eurydice (Marie Déa), though the brush with the fantastique inspires the artist far more than the return to bourgeois domesticity. He's soon in the garage, obsessively jotting down the surrealistic pensées ("L'oiseau chante avec ses doigts") emanating amid radio static. Gods and hipsters? The Gestapo and the bureaucracy? "Interpret as you wish," says Jean Cocteau, whose masterpiece of masterpieces reflects the historical traumas since the release of Le Sang d'un Poète. Death is a diminutive dominatrix in an inconvenient love triangle, her netherworld is the rubble of a bombed-out military academy. Mirrors are portals, an inspiration from Rilke as well as the ideal manifestation of creativity's narcissistic side. "What does the marble think when it's being sculpted?" Reverse motion to make the dead stand up and gloves jump onto hands, trick cuts in memory of Méliès, the mundane transformed by slow-motion and rear-projection into the most oneiric of films. Deren and Anger are taken stock of, the salute to Welles is reciprocated in The Trial. The faddish and the eternal, art's personal metaphysics painted with Cocteau's characteristic lightness of touch. "It is the privilege of legend to be beyond time and space..." Godard lifts the whole kit and caboodle in Alphaville. Cinematography by Nicolas Hayer. With Juliette Gréco, Henri Crémieux, Roger Blin, and Réne Worms. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |