Black Orpheus Lights Up November

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The truly perfect film Black Orpehus is 50 years old this year and it is still fascinating me. I've been to Brazil since the first time I saw the movie at least 20 years ago, and darned if the energy and music and beauty in Salvador da Bahia in 2005 wasn't like that in Rio in 1959. A synopsis from Gene Seymour in an article for the Fall 2005 issue of American Legacy

"The ill-starred ancient Greek romance of Eurydice (played by the luminous Marpessa Dawn) and Orpheus (Breno Mello) takes place in Rio de Janeiro during Carnaval, with an all-black, mostly Brazilian cast, and evocative samba soundtrack by Luiz Bonfá and Antônio Carlos Jobim. With the success of this film, its director Marcel Camus and screenwriter Vinicius de Moraes broadened the global perspective on black cultures and helped ignite the bossa nova movement that would seduce music lovers in both hemispheres"

The film won the Palm D'or at Cannes in 1959, and the Oscar and Golden Globe for best foreign film in 1960. It was shot mostly in a favela (ghetto) in the Leme neighborhood of Rio giving us snapshots of a time and place gone some nearly half a century. But that's not the only appeal. The colors, the music, the rhythm, the atmosphere is magic! To be transported in November watch it. Queue it, rent it, borrow it from the library if you can. As a last resort, buy it. For those with Time Warner Cable in New York, you can see it on Free Movies on Demand, Channel 1008, under the TCM offerings.


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