Phoenixology - the graceful art of death and rebirth - lies at the center of French director Jean Cocteau's final film, Le Testament d'Orphée. The Testament of Orpheus, finished in 1960, was not simply the last film shot by Jean Cocteau, but the culmination of his Orphic saga - a wandering, introspective trinity that began with Le Sang d'un poet (1932) and was followed by Orphée (1950).
But while these first two films were met with popular acclaim, The Testament of Orpheus was (and to a certain extent still is) roundly denounced by critics. It's easy to see why. The movie is both heavy-handed and indulgent. It involves a man lost in space-time (played by Cocteau) who seeks the aid of a professor to pluck him from his ceaseless time travels and place him in his proper time and place. The professor uses "faster-than-light" bullets to kill Cocteau, who is resurrected in his proper place (which is curiously reminiscent of Les Baux in the South of France). From there Cocteau continues his wanderings, guided by Cégeste (played by Edouard Dermithe), a character from Orphée. Cégeste - who in a fashion more Oedipal than Orphic was both Cocteau's lover and adopted son in real life - leads him through a series of surrealist landscapes peopled by gypsies, horse-headed men and a sphinx.
The movie has multiple cameos from Cocteau's famous friends (like Pablo Picasso and Yul Brynner) that he purposely left uncredited, ostensibly because he did not want his viewers to think he was using them simply for publicity. Throughout the movie, Cocteau also places several of his artistic works - such as a tapestry, Judith and Holofernes, and a painting, Head of Orpheus - throughout the movie in a blatant show of self-aggrandizement. Cocteau also provides off-camera commentary, seeding the startling visual imagery of the movie with proleptical musings on "phoenixology" and "Cartesianism."
But in peering through the film's outer layer of baroque self-indulgence, there are moments of breathless beauty and fantasy to be found within. Such as when Cocteau (using his reverse motion technique) creates a hibiscus by showing its dismemberment in reverse. Or - after Cocteau dies a second time - when this black and white film is momentarily infused with a rush of color as his blood, and the hibiscus deepens into a luminous red.
In the final frame, Cocteau, newly awakened from his second death, wanders alone down a mountain road. Confronted by two policemen, he is saved by Cégeste, who pulls him to a mountain face. There, pushed against the mountainside in the figure of a crucifix as Cégeste huddles at his feet, he finally fades away into the granite face of the mountain. The Testament of Orpheus is a movie with such transcendent moments that its slight imperfections become even slighter. I can think of no more fitting monument to a life's work than this film, which even though recognizably flawed, is wrought with such pathos and beauty it deserves to be called great.
