• Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus)

5/14/21 (Fri)

This film actually won an Academy Award?? A bit of exotica from 1959 surrounding a love affair in a Rio favela during Carnival based on the Orpheus-Eurydice legend. A man dumps his jealous fiancée for another woman, and tragedy ensues. The story focuses on a black community, which must have been exotic way back when. The limp script wasn’t very subtle – the main characters are named Orpheus and Eurydice – and the acting was actually embarrassing. The writers didn’t seem concerned with making much sense; for instance, when the woman is running fearfully from a threatening guy in a skeleton suit (honestly), she decides to leave the Carnival proceedings where revelers and police are everywhere and take a dark, quiet road back home where she would be completely vulnerable. Why on earth would she do that? Beats me.

I was getting more and more irritated as the story went on, but stuck with it mainly for the fine camerawork. The French director, Marcel Camus, certainly captured the color and vibrancy both of Carnival and Rio itself. He’s been criticized for ignoring the poverty of the favelas (do they really have those amazing views of the bay?), but that this wasn’t really the point of this misbegotten love story. He was focused anyway on the most joyous time of the year in those parts, and it would make sense that even the poor must have fun sometimes. It worked for me.

The one true touch of genius was the awesome music by Luiz Bonfá and Antônio Carlos Jobim, one of the most memorable film scores I’ve ever heard. This film supposedly put bossa nova on the map, and while it’s not still worth watching for that (buy the album), it’s something to be thankful for.

The two leads were attractive, which was all that was asked of them, and others did their best. None of the emotions registered as real; it would have been better if they’d taken out the story entirely and just showed us Carnival. Not recommended at all.

I see that Barack Obama criticized the film in  his memoirs for making “childlike blacks” glamorous for white people, specifically his mother. What a bone-headed reaction. These are Brazilians, not “black people”, and I imagine that the scene would be equally as foreign and exotic to a black African (or black American) as to a white European. Obama’s contention that “the emotions between the races could never be pure…the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart” tells me more about him than the film. What a phony.