For the love of Greek mythology

Greek mythology has inspired storytellers in the centuries since the era of classical Greece.

This week’s selection of films pays homage to one of the most loved stories from the vast Greek canon — that of popular poet and musician Orpheus, whose love for his wife, Euripides, was so great that when she died he risked everything to descend to the underworld to bring her back.

Over the millennia that we’ve continued to tell stories, this one with its strong romantic devotion, epic tragic arc and vision of descent into the underworld has always been one onto which we can project strong sentiment and melodrama in any age.

The Arthouse Essential

Orphée — YouTube

French multihyphenate artist Jean Cocteau’s 1950 adaptation of the myth is perhaps the most well known and emulated film version. Starring square-jawed Cocteau lover Jean Marais as a 1940s French poet/Cocteau twin who, having found fame, fortune and the adoration of the public, finds himself out of fashion and out of ideas. After a rival is killed by a motorcyclist, Orphée becomes obsessed with a cold ice queen quasi fascist woman known as Princess Death. His obsession with her leads him to neglect his long suffering wife Eurydice and when she dies, Orphée guilt-ridden and grief-stricken follows her into the underworld to get her back.

Cocteau’s use of never-before-seen special effects techniques allowed him to create a heavily symbolic series of images heavily influenced by the new psychology of theorists such as Jacques Lacan, hugely popular at the time in France and Europe.

While the fidelity to the original myth loses itself in the surrealist enjoyment in which the director revels using to confuse audience and characters alike, the film remains an impressive visual puzzle of post-World War 2 European cinema’s strangest experiments. It’s not quite the myth of Orpheus as originally intended but it is a version of the myth quite unlike any other.

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The Stone Cold Classic

Black Orpheus — YouTube

White French filmmaker Marcel Camus decided to head to Rio de Janeiro for his version of the myth, which transposes it to Brazil and celebrates the unique culture and energy of the country. It also demonstrates the inherent universalism of the story. His decision to use an all-black cast was also a significant representational step forward in the pre-US civil rights era of 1959.

Orpheus here is not a poet or musician, but rather a well-loved trolley car conductor by day and charismatic star of one of the Carnival’s samba groups by night. He is engaged to a self-confident local woman but his heart belongs to the more enigmatic and beautiful Eurydice. When his betrothed gets wind of his true intentions, she’s none too happy and so Orpheus and Eurydice must escape together pursued by the jealous spurned lover and Death, leading them through the sweltering, pulsating streets of Carnival time Rio.

Filmed using newly popular techniques of the neorealist movement and featuring real locations and a predominantly amateur cast, the film was hugely popular in Europe and America where it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar for best foreign film. It was not, however, so well received in Brazil where, in spite of its memorable score by samba legends Luiz Bonfá and Antonio Carlos Jobim, it was decried for eroticising the country and reinforcing European stereotypes of Rio as an all-night party city full of “hot-blooded Latin” types.

That may be somewhat true, but on its own terms as a celebration of Brazilian life, culture and music, the film still stands up as a pioneering piece of revisionist mythological reimagination.

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The Diamond in the Rough

The Fugitive Kind — Rent or buy from Apple TV +

It’s not nearly as loved as the more famous Tennessee Williams adaptation and Marlon Brando breakout film A Streetcar Named Desire, but this 1960 version of a lesser-known Williams’ play, Orpheus Descending, directed by Sydney Lumet and also starring Brando, has more going for it than critics were willing to admit at the time.

If Streetcar was Brando at his most youthful, dangerous and method-mad then Fugitive Kind is the actor at the peak of his fame. He’s not so dangerous here, but he’s still deeply committed to bringing an edge to his portrayal of antisocial drifter Xavier, who finds himself trapped in a small southern town and soon becomes the centre of a bitter love triangle.

On the one side is the married Lady Torrance (Anna Magnani) and on the other the wild alcoholic Carol Cutrere (Joanne Woodward). Caught in between their affections, Xavier becomes a pawn in a powerplay that ends in victory for Lady Torrance. He soon finds himself descending into darkness as he takes up her offer of a job in the general store she and her bedridden husband run, only to find that her attentions will land him in trouble and force him to make a fateful decision that will reverberate across the town.

It’s not the most assured of Lumet’s stage adaptations, nor the most memorable of Brando’s performances, but there’s still something uneasy, tumultuous and volatile lurking just enough below its surface to keep you watching until its decidedly overwrought final moments.

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