Christopher Rhoten
If there’s any specific praise to be given to the lineup of the 13th Annual Chattanooga Film Festival, it’s that the appeal of cinema has been appreciated in all forms. I sat down to Virgilio Villoresi’s lavish, esoteric Orfeo less than fifteen minutes after witnessing possibly the nastiest film I’ve ever seen, Gregory Morin’s Flush, a bottle film about a man who’s relentlessly tortured after getting his head stuck in a toilet. Both films charmed an eager crowd and received equally long applause. Movies, man.
Orfeo, making its U.S. debut after premiering almost a year ago out of competition at the Venice International Film Festival, is unabashedly a right-brained fairy tale in the footsteps of Jean Cocteau. The 60s comic book it is based on (Poema a Fumetti, or “Poem Strip”) was already inspired by the films of Cocteau, Federico Fellini, and Mario Bava, sewing this influence into the tapestry of the concept. An adaptation of an adaptation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, Orfeo draws generously from the rich history of cinematic fables, claiming a welcome, if somewhat purloined, spot in the grand library that is film.
Orfeo (Luca Vergoni) is a quiet pianist at a Milan club called the Polypus. One night, the audience includes gorgeous ballerina Eura (Giulia Maenza). Having seen his performance, she invites him to hers; Orfeo attends one of Eura’s recitals in return, leaving her a letter backstage declaring his fervent desire. The two abscond to a remote cabin, but shortly afterward, Eura disappears, and Orfeo sees her enter a small door leading to an abandoned villa across from his house. He dutifully follows, finding himself trapped in a dizzying underworld where the only way out is through.
All manner of freaks and freak-outs await Orfeo in this hellish purgatory, from skeleton pirates to a talking coat to a scarecrow king to a goddess of some sort who sings him a charming little song about how screwed he is. There’s a terror to star Luca Vergoni’s performance that I really love—too often in these types of films, such bizarre occurrences elicit wonder or awe. Vergoni frequently shrieks and cowers in fear, very much attuned to the fact that Orfeo borrows more from Dario Argento’s horror filmography than just the color.
If you’re familiar with Orpheus and Eurydice, you don’t need me to tell you what “happens,” nor should you expect any rich character work or Robert Eggers-esque recreation of whatever period the film is supposed to take place in. Orfeo is not so much concerned with the notes played in its operatic melody as the tune and timbre of its instrumentation. The story serves as an excuse to experiment with animation, uncanny stop-motion, lavish costumes, intricate production design, and old-fashioned visual effects, brought to life by production designer Riccardo Carelli alongside animators Anna Ciammitti, Umberto Chiodi, and Stefania Demicheli.
There’s some Tim Burton in the winged creatures that attack Orfeo, found also in the frequent combination of stop-motion and miniatures, employed whenever anything beyond a medium shot is required. The baroque detailing of both the architecture and music is reminiscent of Fellini, while the flying disembodied jacket wouldn’t be totally out of place in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (never mind making comparisons to his own Orphic trilogy). The list could go on and on: Del Toro, the Brothers Quay, and even a whisker of influence from Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics can all be felt or heard in Villoresi’s debut.
In casting so wide a net, Orfeo eludes an important quality: the apparition of originality. It’s not exactly a fresh vision so much as a pattern of recycled ones, gorgeous and breathtaking though they may be. All this artifice makes it hard for the central love story to shine, and the lack of interest in fleshing out these archetypes into real people becomes increasingly apparent the longer the film goes on.
Still, even if Orfeo has paradoxically humble aspirations, it knows what it wants to be and does exactly that. In an early sequence of Eura performing, the director splices together Super 8 footage of his own mother dancing, giving the scene a flair that’s impossible not to admire. When Orfeo sticks his head beneath a pond and sees an animated spider-like creature, or when the Wizard of the Woods grabs the screen as though it were a projector cloth, it dawned on me that the sheer number of so many oddities within a single film is, itself, sort of novel.
Villoresi has proved himself a well-read artisan, pushing back against the rise of AI with modern mythmaking that could only arise from a human mind. Orfeo may only tap into the bewilderment of a life without love and the transformation that follows finding it, but it dives headfirst into retelling its simple tale with the panache of the greats.
