Orfeo (Breno Mello) is a singer and acoustic guitar player. He is a young man pursued by Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira), a temperamental woman determined to marry Orfeo. Orfeo is idolized by two pre-teenaged boys, Zeca (Aurino Cassiano) and Benedito (Jorge Dos Santos).
Meanwhile, Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn), a gorgeous young woman, arrives from the country to visit her fun-loving cousin Serafina (Lea Garcia). Serafina has a boyfriend Chico (Waldemar De Souza). Orfeo and Eurydice encounter each other until they are in love.
A happy ending is not to be. Death (Adhemar Ferreira de Silva) intermittently stalks Eurydice, to her terror. It is Mardi Gras in Rio, and Orfeo and Eurydice dance together at the festival. Mira sees them and is enraged. She tries to murder Eurydice, but is stopped by Death. Death pursues Eurydice, with Orfeo running behind them. Tragic events follow.
Adhemar Ferreira de Silva was a sports hero in Brazil, a two-time gold medalist in the 1952 and 1956 Olympics. In Brazil, he was best-known of all the actors, so it is surprising that he is made unrecognizable beneath a costume.
How others will see it. Black Orpheus became an international hit. Critics and audiences considered it something different and refreshing. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars and Golden Globes. The film was less well received in Brazil, where poor blacks have a hardscrabble life without adventure, carnivals, and carousing.
Nonetheless, the movie has a respectable 11K user votes at imdb.com, and a fine (if not outstanding) user rating of 7.4 out of 10. Women over 45 grade it highest (7.8). Non-Americans vote it lower (7.3) than Americans (7.6).
The user reviews are definitely mixed. Some share the belief of Barack Obama that the film is patronizing, depicting grown blacks as children who live for the festival so they can put on costumes and dance wildly. Others agree that it is something different, filmed in rich technicolor with a touching romance.
How I felt about it. Most of the cast, including the lead Breno Mello, were non actors cast by the director on a shoestring budget. The exception was Marpessa Dawn, a Pittsburgh actress with minor credits. For most of the cast, the film was the highlight of their brief cinematic careers. The exception is Lea Garcia, who has a great many credits and continued to work into her late 80s.
The problem with non-professional actors is that they can only act about as well as you or I could, if suddenly confronted with a director and script and pushed in front of a camera. Thus, Chico appears dazed, and Hermes (Alexandro Constantino) seems like a nice old man instead of the lord of the underworld. Orfeo is as spontaneous as a child, and Eurydice is equally simple, alternating between timidity, fear, and joy.
Eurydice falls in love all too quickly with Orfeo. When Orfeo arrives at the morgue, it isn't clear why Orfeo is allowed to leave with Eurydice's body. He isn't family, and was a complete stranger to her two days before.
We aren't sure why Benedito and Zeca are even in the movie, except that female viewers are readily charmed by adorable children. Even at their young age, Benedito and Zeca ought to know that playing the guitar does not make the sun come up. Their scene at the end with a little girl is simply the director pasting an upbeat ending on a downbeat story.
But the movie is different, especially for a 1959 film, in that it features attractive young blacks in an exotic, distant locale.