Black orpheus

Black Orpheus (1959) is a film by French film director Marcel Camus. A Brazilian, French and Italian co-production, it was shot in Rio de Janeiro and contributed to making Brazilian popular music world famous.

Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfá (Luiz Floriano Bonfá: 1922 - 2001) are the authors of the two main themes of the music, which would become classics of bossa nova and jazz: A felicidade, by Jobim, and Manhã de Carnaval, by Bonfá.

Based on the 1954 play Orfeu da Conceição, by the poet and also musician Vinícius de Moraes, the film is an adaptation of the Orpheus myth to the atmosphere of the Brazilian carnival.

Plot

The beautiful Eurydice arrives in Rio de Janeiro on the eve of its famous carnival, where she will be welcomed by a cousin who lives in a favela suburb of the city. She approaches there, among the frenzy of samba through the streets, in a tram whose driver, a musician named Orfeo, a popular hero of the place due to the seductive power of his songs, notices her charms. However, his relationship with her will be affected by the suspicions of her jealous girlfriend. Passion will plunge them into the vertiginous trance of the carnival, which in turn will drag them to a fateful outcome.

During that carnival night, Orpheus and Hermes search for Eurydice, leading Orpheus to a concierge who leads him up a large dark spiral staircase, a reference to the mythical descent into the underworld, and a door with a dog named Cerberus, after him. to the three-headed dog of Hades, where upon entering the spirit of Eurydice inhabits the body of an old woman who speaks to her. When Orpheus turns and looks at her, he sees the old woman and Eurydice's spirit leaves.

As in the Greek myth, Orpheus, despite being able to make the sun rise with his music and his singing, and to captivate all who hear him, fails to fulfill his love and dies.

Comments

It won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1959, and in 1960 the Oscars and Golden Globes for best foreign language film.

In 1999, Carlos Diegues made a remake of this film entitled Orfeu, whose soundtrack was produced by Caetano Veloso.

In 2005, coinciding with the year of Brazil in France, René Letzgus and Bernard Tournois screened their documentary À la recherche d'Orfeu negro (In Search of Orpheus) at the Cannes Film Festival black), which explores the social repercussion that Black Orpheus has had in Brazil up to the present, especially with regard to the internationalization of carnival, samba, bossa nova and work of Vinicius de Moraes.

In it, important personalities of Brazilian music and culture offer their testimony, such as Gilberto Gil, Milton Nascimento, Carlos Diegues... and Breno Mello himself, the actor who played Orfeo, whom this documentary rescued from oblivion in who lived poorly in a humble house in Porto Alegre, and finally allowed him to attend the Cannes Film Festival, where he received a tribute 46 years after the glorious presentation of Camus's film.

The main actors of Black Orpheus died in the summer of 2008: Breno Mello, on July 11 in Porto Alegre; Marpessa Dawn, on August 25 in Paris, almost 50 years after having embodied the relationship between Orpheus and Eurydice in the cinema.

In 2013, Canadian music group Arcade Fire used several scenes from the film for the video (lyric version) for Afterlife.