Jean Cocteau

  • Orphée [Orpheus] (1950)

    Orphée [Orpheus] (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) Avant-garde cinema and I aren’t good friends, so it would be trivially easy for me to dismiss Orphée as nothing more than a pretentious experiment. But I like the result more than I expected: In taking Greek mythology and setting it in then-contemporary 1950 France, Jean Cocteau already has something interesting as a foundation. Trying to present a fantasy story with the special effects limits of the time is a further challenge—and given Cocteau’s oft-demonstrated stylistic flair for the poetic, he wouldn’t settle for cheap and ridiculous if cheap and effective was available. So it is that relatively simple optical tricks are used to good effect to portray ghosts and people walking through mirrors, or strolling through a devastated post-mortem landscape with the protagonist standing out as being more real than the dead. (One of the few times that rear-projection degradation is used to stylistic effect.) Other shots include reversed images and other eeriness that do create an effective atmosphere. And that’s not even getting into the updates to the Orpheus myth, with things as mundane as a radio or a rear-view mirror taking on symbolic meaning. While Jean Marais is intermittently annoying as Orpheus (the silted dialogue doesn’t help, nor the odd tonal shifts), María Casares is fascinating as a representative of death—her character seems surprisingly modern in the middle of so much formalism. Now, there are clear limits to my appreciation of the result—my rational mind can’t really rest well in the middle of so much artistic haze, and you can find Cocteau’s commentary about Orphée in my dictionary as the definition of insufferable. But there’s a bit more to Orphée than many French films of the period, and I would argue that the film is now more effective than it ever was, because we are now looking at a millennia-old myth filtered through a poetic take based on reality now seventy years distant. There’s an additional dimension there that was absent for contemporary audiences, and that does help Orphée become an even more fascinating film.

  • Le sang d’un poète [The Blood of a Poet] (1930)

    Le sang d’un poète [The Blood of a Poet] (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (archive.org streaming, June 2020) One of my big conceptual breakthroughs of my mid-twenties was realizing that adjectives such as “post-modern” and “avant-garde” were not necessarily tied to the present and could, in fact, designate historical works. A film such as Jean Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète, for instance, is ninety years old and yet still as avant-garde today as it was back then. Trying to describe the plot is an exercise in futility, as it’s a surrealist collage of dreamlike imagery somewhat reminiscent of Bunuel (surrealism being big at the time). It’s not uninteresting, but it is far slower-paced than it could have been. Then again, I’m definitely more modern than postmodern in my film appreciation – and have been for decades. Something is worth noting for twenty-first century viewers: Le sang d’un poète uses some very effective special effects, as primitive as they may be.

  • La belle et la bête [Beauty and the Beast] (1946)

    La belle et la bête [Beauty and the Beast] (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) If you approach writer-director Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bête expecting a rougher version of the Disney film … wow, you’re going to have an interesting time. Here he adapts the poetic realism trend of 1930s French cinema to the classic fairytale and the result feels as if it was captured from dreams—hazy, lyrical, nonsensical and yet with a logic of its own. The basic problems of the beauty and the beast fairytale are still very much present—the Stockholm syndrome, the ending that mocks the “ugliness is superficial” message—but executed in such a way that it’s easy to let the style triumph over substance. Which isn’t to say that La belle et la bête skirts its fantastic roots—the makeup of the beast remains deeply impressive, and the film doesn’t dance around the literalization of the metaphor. It’s often surprising, sometimes ethereal, and more compelling than you’d expect. Still, Cocteau overplays his hand and the film is easily a bit too long even at 96 minutes—there’s only so much setup you can tolerate before demanding some progress, after all. Still, this is one of the strongest 1940s French films (and it wasn’t a slough of a decade for French cinema)—still mesmerizing in its stated intention to deliver a true fairytale on the screen.