'Orpheus' brings music to a myth
One problem with the romantic tragedy, historically speaking, was that you couldn't dance to it. In 1959, that changed. Marcel Camus delighted the world with ''Black Orpheus," which relocated the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro just in time for Carnival. The movie, which is showing at the Brattle Theatre through Tuesday, won the top prize at that year's Cannes Film Festival and gave bossa nova, which was still in its infancy, to the rest of the planet.
The film is a musical in the loosest, least formal way. No one in the cast interrupts the narrative to sing. But the hills are utterly alive with the sound of music -- an exuberant percussive thwapping that never lets up. This is a movie about the marriage between sound and image, and the sound is wearing the pants in the relationship.
Indeed, the Orpheus of Greek myth tamed the masses with his lyre. For Camus's purposes, he's Orfeo, a streetcar driver (Breno Mello) who can seduce crowds with his guitar and the gentle rhythms of bossa nova. He's also a wicked dancer, with moves that wouldn't be out of place in the center forward position (Mello was a soccer star in his day). Orfeo is also something of a cad. Women swoon wherever he goes. But he's engaged to Mira (Lourdes De Oliveira), a feisty whirlwind and sexpot who always seems to forget how angry she is when the opportunity to dance presents itself.
When Orfeo and Mira go to get their marriage license, the old guy who hands them out, hip to the myth, hears Orfeo's name and assumes Mira is Eurydice. Oops. Mira reads Orfeo the riot act, assuming Eurydice is another woman. As it turns out, she is. But Orfeo doesn't know it yet. Our Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) is a heavenly country girl who's come to Rio to stay with her cousin (Léa Garcia) for Carnival. Eurydice and Orfeo meet and fall madly in love. The rest is tragedy.
But the movie's festival atmosphere never dies. Even when the streamers, confetti, and brass bands aren't there, you can see and hear them. Camus comes up with a couple of inspired moments to emphasize sensation over seriousness. One is a transition that comes in the opening seconds. A staid shot of a frieze featuring Orpheus and Eurydice explodes with the sight of locals making crazy music. Another comes a few minutes later as Eurydice wanders through Rio. We see her from way up high, drifting through an empty downtown square. She's a speck. The camera pans right, and in the distance we see a flood of activity flowing down a city street. The message is pretty clear: ''Party over there!"
''Black Orpheus" has its similarities to Otto Preminger's 1954 ''Carmen Jones," the Dorothy Dandridge-Harry Belafonte musical that, via Oscar Hammerstein, moved Bizet's opera to the Korean War era. I've never been crazy about ''Black Orpheus" as a title, but I guess ''Orfeo Jones" doesn't quite do it either. In any case, the two movies obviously have new racial and geographic contexts in common. But they also insist on the transcendent power of music.
Incredibly, the most lyrical passage in Camus's movie isn't memorable for its sound, however. The adaptation plays fast and loose with the Greek myth, but in the climactic sequences it turns clever and interpretative. We leave the chaos of Carnival after a man dressed in a skeleton's costume chases Eurydice into a theater. We know the character is Death, and the outcome won't be pleasant, even after Orfeo arrives on the scene in a gilt mesh top and corresponding skirt. (He looks like a ''Solid Gold" dancer.) Camus reaches into his theatrical tool bag (staging, lighting, Death's black Spider-Man costume) to bring out the tale's underworld.
Writing about the film, David Ehrenstein has observed that Death could be ''the sort of maniac found on the streets of any major city." True enough, and the poetry of the last 20 minutes arises from the film's indifference to distinctions between the real and the figurative. This obviates the usual emotional heft associated with melodrama. The ending may be sad, but the feet remain unmistakably happy.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. 
