Those who are, like me, admirers of the cinematic style practiced by Wes Anderson in the last decade, of fantasies with a surrealist touch, bringing together on screens formidable casts in stories where reality melts into legends and imagination, will perhaps be surprised to learn that this cinematic genre is not an invention of the 21st century. Anderson’s most illustrious precursor was Jean Cocteau – the French philosopher, playwright, poet and filmmaker to whose name all the avant-garde currents of European arts since the mid-20th century are linked. Jean Cocteau saw film as an art of synthesis and even if his filmography does not include too many titles, each of them is significant. ‘Le testament d’Orphée ou ne me demandez pas pourquois’ (which translates into ‘The Testament of Orpheus or Don’t Ask Me Why’ or just ‘Testament of Orpheus’ in the English distribution) is his last film of this genre. Filmed in 1959, the year Cocteau turned 70, and released three years before his death, this film can also be seen as Jean Cocteau‘s testament.
The main hero is the poet himself, and the main performer is himself. The poet has the gift of traveling in time, of influencing destinies, of searching for essence. His intersection with a 20th century scientist makes him aware of relativity and the dimensional unity between time and space, but his gift of transcending dimensions brings him before the tribunal of the gods. A connoisseur and passionate about mythology, Cocteau builds a world in which reality is only one of the possible facets, and the capital punishment consists of living reality in one single life, until the end from which no one can escape. What we watch on the screen is a dreamlike journey and an exploration of his own universe, the one in which dreams turn into images.
Viewers looking for a coherent plot in the classical sense of narrative constructions will quickly be disappointed. The sequence of experiences on the screen must be followed as a musical construction, with abstract symbols whose translations remain the responsibility of each viewer. Visually, the film combines bold shots (Roland Pontoizeau is the cinematographer) with sets that reveal the innards of a movie studio. Charlie Kaufman will do the same almost 50 years later in ‘Synecdoche, New York’. But this film also has predecessors in the surrealist films of Luis Buñuel created three decades before this film was made. The music of Gluck and Handel accompanies most of the film. Astute viewers will have fun identifying the appearance on the screens of established stars of the time – Jean Marais, Yul Brynner, Charles Aznavour, Claudine Auger -, but also of celebrities from other artistic universes such as Pablo Picasso or Françoise Sagan. Some of them appear for only a single sequence, for a few seconds. I enjoyed this film which is a document of a vanished artistic world and of the creators who made it and still keep it alive, at least for the duration of its viewing or re-watching.