Film Perfection

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

One can view this movie, and find themselves asking themselves by the end, what did they watch? The movie has very confusing that tossed all logic out of the window. One might think it's a continue story of Orpheus (1950) with the opening scenes, but the series of symbolic encounters and surreal images more resembles The Blood of a Poet (1930). This movie might be considered the final part of the Orphic Trilogy, but it's just a film that is a petrified fountain of thought, in my opinion. In his last film, legendary poet/film maker Jean Cocteau portrays an 18th century poet who travels through time on a quest for divine wisdom while seeing his past work come back alive due to his inspirations and obsessions with them. Cocteau's persona is unstuck in time, and materializes in and out to episodically interact with various characters such as two judges who essentially put Cocteau's life on trial, some mimes dressed like horses, a camp of gypsies and a professor who apparently enabled this time travel through inventing a bullet which flies faster than light. In the opening narration, Cocteau alternatingly calls the movie "a striptease show where I take off my body to reveal my soul" and "a poet's legacy to the youth which has always supported him." Testament of Orpheus brings full circle the journey Cocteau began in The Blood of a Poet, an exploration of the torturous relationship between the artist and his creations. In a mysterious wasteland, he meets several symbolic phantoms that bring about his death and resurrection. In the end, the film is mostly a tribute to himself and him looking back at his work before accepting his death. Too bad, the movie doesn't truly show that. Instead, the audience gets an phantasmagorical whirl of imagery, tragedy and an enormous, transcendent sense of wonder. The movie works as an art surreal film, as the movie goes from one dream sequence to another. The film use great work of imagery. Mirrors, horses, flowers, tapestries, are used to represent Cocteau's past. His special effects and camera tricks are always a highlight of his work, as he sees slow motion walk scenes, and selective color. My favorite is the backwards-motion. A great example of this is how the punctured, smoke-filled balloon reassembles or a burned photograph is restored. Others are an erased blackboard sketch reappears. A draped sheet flies upward. Cegeste jumps out of the ocean, perfectly groomed. And the lengthiest example is the meticulous repair of a torn-up hibiscus flower. Check them out, it's probably the best high lights of the film. The film was shot on location at Les Baux in the South of France and it's beautiful. The movie also host a few famous cameos such as Pablo Picasso, Jean-Pierre Leáud, Jean Marais and Yul Brynner. The music is charming. Most of the film is Handel. Concerto in A minor, Op.6. While it's the best of the trio, it's nowhere near a good film. It's a bit pretentious, stiffly acted and cinematically dated. His lack of writing skills can be seen in this undeniably dreadful screenplay, loaded with the most clichéd statements about poetry and art, and the most trite and incongruous imagery imaginable. The scenes with a man walking about with a fake horses head might be a bit silly today. By contrast, Cocteau's symbolism is so heavy-handed, so obvious, and so manifold that they have little real-world referents so they can be hardly understood by the average viewer. The scene with the faster than light bullets is weird science, Cocteau brings them into the past so the professor can shoot him, thus sending him back in time. How all that works is left unexplained. In a way, the movie is full of mixed imagery that rarely makes any sense to anybody, but Cocteau himself. In the end, Cocteau, the poet movie maker, nobody has reached higher doing poetry with images. Nobody. Rather than being a complete ego trip, it is closer to what Fellini did in "8 1/2", a similar work of genius, where the soul is searched, a document is made with all the art and craft the director can bring, and doesn't matter if the audience get it or not. Once Cocteau vanishes for the last time, the film ends. "If you didn't like it, I'm sorry," he humbly adds. Check it out if you're a huge Cocteau fan, if not, research more about him before watching this film.

My summary is NOT meant to be sarcasm but an accurate description of what I saw in "Testament of Orpheus". It really does play a lot like a home movie of Cocteau's--complete with his friends making guest appearances. A few of the more notable ones are Jean Pierre Leaud, Pablo Picasso and Yul Brynner. As for the plot, it's really hard to describe and it is VERY freaky. It's sort of like a combination of a dream, the life of Cocteau, time travel and Greek mythology all rolled into one very strange film. If you try to make sense of all this, it will probably make your head explode--and it seems pretty clear that Cocteau had no intention of making the film understandable or doing a traditional narrative. Because it is essential a vanity project and an art film, I really cannot rate it. However, I think I'm very safe in saying that the film probably holds no interest to the average viewer but is something best seen by Cocteau-philes and lovers of the avant garde or surreal.As for me and my own opinion about the film's merits, I thought the project was very repetitive--though it did have a few moments of interesting introspection by Cocteau (who plays himself through the film). Sadly, though, despite his introspection, this is yet another Cocteau film in which he over-used slow-motion and rolled the film backwards again and again to achieve his artsy effects. Essentially, you see nothing new here in the way of techniques--having seen this is "Blood of a Poet" thirty years earlier. And, it does not have any sort of lasting appeal or a coherent story like "Orpheus" or "Beauty and the Beast" (his two masterpieces). Skipable if you ask me but a mildly (very mildly) interesting piece of performance art.

Cocteau must have been quite vain to make a film of his life and star in it. What a waste of time. Pretentious dialog, dated special effects, a penurious set, over-studious acting, and a score that just did not fit.The dialog was stilted and affected: it did not make any sense at all. Maybe it did to Cocteau but even that I doubt. It was full of enigmatic and obtuse references to who-knows-what? I suspect Cocteau just went overboard in tangential talk.The special effects were embarrassing but done with such gravity that you had to take a double-take at the vapid seriousness displayed.The only actor worth seeing was Yul Brynner. Cocteau should have stayed on the other side of the camera. He was not an actor just like Hitchcock was not. Cocteau should have learned from Hitchcock and just had a cameo role. It actually became painful watching him move deliberately from scene to scene. Not that the scenes made any sense except in his poor attempt at stitching his memories together.The main set was a ruined building built with large blocks but it had peoples' initials scored on their faces. So a scene that was intended to be somber or meaningful had scrawls of past visitors clearly visible. Whatever effect Cocteau intended was lost by the distractions. The set was messy too. Could not it have been cleaned and swept for heaven's sake? The acting in general was amateurish. There was no spontaneity, no joie de vivre; nothing to show Cocteau led anything but a pretty boring life. Surprising really when you know he was responsible for Beauty and the Beast, one of my favorite movies. But that had Jean-Alfred Villain-Marais and Josette Day in it.The music was empty and powerless. I have just watched the movie and cannot even remember any part of the score. If you are going to write a score for a movie make some of it memorable.

Although the elements involved in the last part of the trilogy (of course it's a trilogy!) are same, the movie is brilliant in the way it deal and approaches with a poet's final years. I loved the self-reference to the earlier versions and to Jean cocteau himself. The film touches A film inside a film, a stage inside a stage, a life inside a life, a body inside a body and ofcourse a world inside a world. This is a "timeless" classic. No pun intended. This just my first viewing, I intend to see it again and again. One interesting thing (a speculation) is the BULLET from the future world. I wonder whether James cameroon got inspired from this idea to come up with "The Terminator". Personally, I was always interested by the idea of NO TIME. This movie touches the possible cyclic nature of the time and sometime it even goes even further suggesting that -- ALL TIMES reside within ONE or NONE -- Well we're not supposed to understand it :) I loved the dig at intellectuals.I would recommend this movie to all surrealist and anybody who has the eternal question -- WHY?! This movie is not an answer nor it asks question. Just OBEY the natural laws and see the movie :)9/10