Orpheus: The Tale I Never Heard

This flick was pretty jaw dropping. During several moments in the film, I caught myself staring at the screen with my mouth literally open, most often during the underworld scenes. The whole movie sets you up to wonder the the heck is going on behind the mirrors in this secret world. I could more or less come close to knowing what to expect on the other side because of the story intro that a classmate provided before we viewed the movie. But I'd be curious to watch the movie without having any background of the Orpheus story.

I wanted to address some certain matters of plot and time and motivations to better understand why things happened and all that. For example, towards the beginning when "Death" is with the drunk Cegestes, had they been hanging together long before that? It's an odd thing to wonder, but he's driving around with her so I wondered where their little relationship began. And similar to that, at what point did Death decide she wanted/loved/liked Orpheus? She seemed to be into poets, but he didn't really do anything poetic that would imply he's anyone special. Had she eyed him up before? Why didn't she immediately make him her underworld puppet? Does Death know all? Perhaps she looked at him and she knew all she'd need to know. Of course you could say, he's hanging out at the Poet's Bar (wasn't it called something like that?) so he must be important in the writer's community.

I was a bit thrown by a comment later in the movie about Orpheus having been in Death's bedroom. I assumed it was meant that the bedroom he's placed in when Cegestes is being taken to the underworld is her bedroom, but I would have assumed her bedroom to actually be in the underworld. Or was that where the house was? But that wouldn't explain why they needed to go through the mirror with Cegestes.

One truly weird thing that I just couldn't get was how often Heurtebise seemed to try to urge Orpheus to take care of or pay attention to his wife, when it seemed as if Heurtebise was digging her himself quite a bit. He was a bizarre character, constantly surprising me. Right from the get go when he's first talking to Eurydice, when he fumbles up his speech and mentions he's already dead, I forget the exact quote. He did things that I just didn't expect.

Are we to assume also, that Orpheus's permission to enter the underworld while still alive is based on his status as an artist/poet? Poets are special people, hence Death takes a fancy to him? And he's granted all the attention from Heurtebise and a seemingly increasing access to all of the happenings of the underworld because of this? Speaking of that scene where he first travels to the underworld, I think that scene jumped out at me as the most "homosexual". That sounds bad. I'm not sure how else to put that but it sounds bad. Anyways, I don't think there was any intended love connection between Orpheus and Heurtebise, but just seeing the one man float and the other bounce around like he's walking on the moon with the wind blowing definitely brought it to mind. Plus the scene just seemed surreal which added to that feeling. I'm not sure if it was on the way to or back, but Orpheus also put his hand on the shoulder of Heurtebise, which again, added to the general feeling of that scene.

Quick note about the special effects, mainly the backwards/forwards effects. The whole glove putting on actually being them being taken off was great. Seems simple enough, but it's obvious that it's just playing backwards, so you can look into a bit more to see what it might have meant to do it like that. On one hand, I think it was a sign of the start of the going back in time process to before Death arrived and took control of things. Sure at that point, it was up in the air for the audience as to what might happen, but it was a turning point I think. On another hand it could imply the backwards nature of the underworld, how different it is from the living world.

And we talked about this idea of 'who is the hero' exactly. Orpheus? Not so much. Death? Eh. I thought Heurtebise seemed to shine in that role the most. For being a chauffeur and subservient most of the time, he seemed to show the most special powers (haha) and seemed to know what was going on all of the time, or at least be able to control things a bit better that anyone else. Towards the end when Death has him reverse time to get things back to normal, I got the impression that Death herself wasn't strong enough to do it. She may have 'ordered' him to do it yes, so maybe I'm wrong.

And finally, let's talk about this notion that poets and the artistic folks are possessed by some evil that gets in their minds and forces them to spew and create all of these artistic pieces. I think the whole Cegestes broadcasts from the Underworld lend itself to this idea pretty tightly. Someone did bring up that the broadcasts started before Cegestes passed over; that is just weird. Orpheus is so wrapped in, almost in a trance over these broadcasts and I think (correct me if I'm wrong) it was the these broadcasts that he turned into his own writing. And the broadcasts were actually Cegestes earlier works or something. Then you have a community of people seeing the potential evil in this artistic man, thinking he had something to do with the Cegestes disappearance. It plays well on the types of reactions to the writers/artists that people used to give, thinking some evil had penetrated their minds and forced these words out of them.

Oh yeah, that's awesome that hey had to incorporate gloves into the film because they were putting their hands into mercury for the 'entering the mirror' effect.