Before watching Testament of Orpheus, the final part of Jean Cocteau’s trilogy, it’s advisable to check out his first film, The Blood of a Poet, handily included as an extra on Madman’s DVD.
The latter will serve as an introduction to the French artist/filmmaker’s idiosyncratic, non-linear form of storytelling and his extravagant use of surreal imagery and symbols.
It’s also advisable to see Orpheus, the middle section of the trilogy released by Madman in 2007, which features some of the characters and events referenced in Testament of Orpheus.
As a newcomer to Cocteau’s works, I found the first and final movies alternately brilliant, moving, humorous, disturbing and baffling to the point of being incomprehensible. Released in 1930, the dreamlike The Blood of a Poet tells of a poet (Enrique Rivero) who encounters a statue that comes alive and sends him through a mirror into the corridor of a hotel, where he witnesses bizarre scenes such as a small girl being beaten by her mother then climbing the ceiling, a ritual suicide and a snowball fight among schoolboys that has a tragic outcome.
His final movie, 1960’s Testament of Orpheus, stars Cocteau as an 18th Century time-travelling poet who is transported to the present, a fantastical world where he meets Cégeste (Edouard Dermithe, Cocteau’s adopted son in this film and in real life), who was left alone and abandoned at the end of Orpheus.
With Cégeste as his companion/guide, Cocteau is hauled before a tribunal presided over by judges the Princess (an imperious Maria Casarès) and Heurtebise (François Périer), both holdovers from Orpheus. Cocteau is charged with two 'crimes,’ innocence and trying to transport himself into another world. He pleads guilty to both. Eventually he’s speared to death by the goddess Athena, a grisly scene witnessed by Pablo Picasso and his wife, and miraculously is reincarnated, a nod to his recurring motif of "phoenixology," meaning the art of repeatedly dying to be reborn.
The film’s English subtitle was Do Not Ask Me Why. That may have been Cocteau having the last laugh.
