Orfeu Negro (Marcel Camus, 1959)

Black Orpheus made a clean sweep of every major award going on its release, and it's easy to see how resetting the Orpheus story in the heady environment of the Brazilian carnival bewitched audiences in the post-war European gloom. It's far removed in this aspect from the melancholia of Jean Cocteau's artful and surreal take, for example. The pace is hyperactive, the characters overblown, and yet this works effectively to create a sense of dislocation and romanticism that's powerful enough that the supernatural element of the original myth can be done away with when the denouement is reached. It's very much a product of its time, and no less fascinating for that, even if just for anthropological reasons, with sexual morality being seen as very much an optional extra rather than a guiding principle.

6/10