Near the end of Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro),
Marcel Camus’s masterpiece of 1959, there comes what can only be
described as an authorial disclaimer that strikes the film’s one
seriously false note. “The happiness of the poor is the great
illusion of Carnival,” we are told, more or less out of the blue.
Up until that point, I think it would hardly occur to most people
to describe what they have seen as an illustration of “the
happiness of the poor.” But there may have been political reasons
why Camus had to stick this in, lest the prevailing left-wing
culture of France’s cultural elite should have been shocked by a
depiction of Third World poor people who are not both obviously
miserable and aware of — and resentful about — their misery.
For the rest of us, the film is a retelling of the tragic
classical legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, but set during Carnival
time in Rio. This Orfeo (Breno Mello) is a tram conductor who, in
his spare time, is a leading light of the Babilonia Samba School,
one of several such institutions that compete for prizes at
Carnival time, and is widely known for his dancing as well as his
singing and guitar playing. In fact, it is said by the two
hero-worshipping boys who follow him around, Benedito (Jorge Dos
Santos) and Zeca (Aurino Cassiano), that Orfeo can make the sun
rise with his music. The film’s famous theme song by Antonio Carlos
Jobim and Luiz Bonfa, though very much understated here as first
Orfeo and then one of the boys picks it out on his guitar, has been
making the sun rise ever since.
Orfeo is also known as a womanizer, and his latest conquest, the
fiery Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira), is determined to make him marry
her, even if it means that she has to buy the ring herself.
Easy-going Orfeo agrees to marry her. But just before
Carnival-time, Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) comes up to Rio from the
country, where she has been terrified by the vision of a man she
says wants to kill her. She means to stay with her cousin, Serafina
(Lea Garcia), a friend and neighbor of Orfeo’s. Orfeo falls for
Eurydice, and Mira becomes frantic with jealousy, threatening to
kill her rival. Meanwhile, a costumed figure meant to represent
death begins hanging around Eurydice as the Carnival festivities
get underway. Naturally, she is terrified. Orfeo tries to soothe
her, telling her: “I will protect you for ever, against everything.
You will never be scared again. Never,” and they declare their
love.
But the urgency of Orfeo’s wish to protect her itself seems to
portend the impossibility of his doing so. Serafina, who is to play
the Queen of Night to Mira’s Queen of Day in Orfeo’s samba, urges
Eurydice to put on her costume and dance in her stead — a way of
hiding from Mira, as well as Death. Serafina even has her own
boyfriend, Chico (Waldemar De Souza), kiss her cousin to lend
plausibility to the disguise. But Mira discovers the truth and,
while Orfeo is dancing in his golden, sun-symbolizing costume,
chases Eurydice through the streets of Rio, which are teeming with
revelers. Soon, Death takes up the pursuit and follows Eurydice to
the now-deserted tram terminus, whose sinister machinery is meant
to make it stand in for the classical underworld.
In the legend, it will be remembered, Orpheus descends to Hades
and so charms the infernal powers with this music that he is
allowed to lead Eurydice back up to the light — provided that he
doesn’t turn around to look at her as she follows him. Of course he
does so, and she is condemned to return to the shades beneath the
earth. It doesn’t quite work like that with our Orfeo — though
he’s got a guide to the underworld in the form of an ancient
janitor at the Bureau of Missing Persons, and a dog called Cerberus
guards the approach to a cigar-smoking witch-doctor, who attempts
to conjure up the spirit world with a wilder version of the
universal dance, laced with bits of voodoo or santeria-like
ceremony. This is a reminder of the origins of the samba in West
African rituals brought to Brazil by slaves.
Camus, who never did anything remotely as good again, is a
committed realist, possibly for political reasons, who is obviously
made a little nervous by the magic and spirit-conjuring — as he
also is by the thought that he might be supposed to be
insufficiently aware of or sympathetic towards the sufferings of
the poor. But the result of this hesitancy with his materials,
whether intentional or not, is to add to the sense of the
seductiveness and danger of the dance and the music and the
spectacular cliff-top scenery of Rio, as if the director himself
were afraid of being drawn too far into his own vision.
In other words, the effect of telling us that the poor of Rio
are not happy, even at Carnival time, is to make us afraid that
they really are happy — or at least that they swim like fish in
the sea of their unhappiness and so don’t recognize it as
unhappiness but simply as their element. That way madness lies, of
course, at least for political rationalists of the left. But the
seductions of the samba here that have captivated audiences for
going on half a century are made the more compelling for seeming —
as perhaps they are — more of a rationalist than a Christian
heresy.
