But – at the risk of disagreeing with the messenger god – the story of Orpheus and Eurydice can and does change in all kinds of unexpected ways. Musical talent doesn’t have to reside in the hands and voice of one man, for example. In the 1959 Brazilian film Orfeu Negro, or Black Orpheus, directed by Marcel Camus,29 it is democratized. Orfeu （Breno Mello） is a talented musician, but the whole of Rio is filled with incredible music and musicians: it is Carnival time. The film begins in the favela where much of the action will take place. It pulsates with singing, playing and – a huge feature of this version of the story – dancing. Music isn’t just something to be listened to here, it’s something to move to. After this establishing sequence which runs throughout the credits, we cut to the harbour where a ferry is arriving. On board is Eurydice （Marpessa Dawn）， who has come to Rio to stay with her cousin because a man – some sort of predator, though we don’t know more – has driven her away from her home.
Eurydice hops onto a tram where everyone seems to be playing or singing something. Orfeu is the tram-conductor: even meeting so casually in a crowded city, we know they are meant to be together. A marching band is playing in the streets, practising for Carnival the following day. Music is representative of both order and disorder in this film. It is highly personal – people playing and dancing for a loved one, or alone – and it is also public, a performance.
By happy coincidence, Eurydice’s cousin lives next door to Orfeu. She fits in to the neighbourhood straight away and a local child, Benedito, gives her a charm he has made. Will you keep it even after you die? he asks. It is the first hint we have that all may not end happily for Eurydice. When Orfeu and Eurydice meet again and discover each other’s names, he is delighted. I’m already in love with you, he laughs. But I don’t love you, she replies. That’s alright, he says, you don’t have to.
Are they the original Orpheus and Eurydice from ancient times, somehow reincarnated in modern Brazil? There is a strong sense that they are, that this 1950s couple are reliving a story that has happened many times before. We have a hint of this in the opening shot of the movie, when a set of sculpted Greek figures disappear to be replaced by a group of Brazilian musicians. Orpheus and Eurydice are not just statues, but part of a living story.
During Carnival preparations, and on the day of Carnival itself, Eurydice is pursued by a terrifying vision of Death, a monochrome masked man whom she cannot escape. No matter where she is, no matter how ornately she is disguised in her cousin’s Carnival outfit, Death cannot be outrun. She races away from him and finds herself on the upper floor of a deserted building, clinging on to a cable so she doesn’t fall. But Death still awaits her and she cannot move. When Orfeu arrives, he flips a switch on the wall. The cable snaked around Eurydice’s hand is live: she is electrocuted and falls to her death. We might note that there is a touch of Alcestis in this narrative as well as the more overt Eurydice story （the snaky cable is a particularly clever touch）： Death as a character waiting for a young woman to die so that he may claim her.
Orfeu is bundled away from the scene, but then cannot accept Eurydice is gone. He tries desperately to find her in the Missing Persons office, tracking through one bureaucratic nightmare after another. He comes to a room filled with stacks of paper. The janitor tells him he won’t find her there; he must call out for her, and she will come. Orfeu and the janitor go searching elsewhere, passing a guard dog called Cerberus, though he only has one head on this occasion. The janitor then guides Orfeu to a ritual gathering where they try to summon Eurydice: this janitor is surely meant to remind us of Charon, the ferryman who takes the dead across the River Styx. Eurydice is partially conjured into the room, but Orfeu cannot turn around or he will see that it is an old woman who speaks with Eurydice’s voice. He leaves and eventually finds Eurydice’s body in the mortuary; he carries her in his arms back to the favela. As he climbs near the edge of a sheer cliff, his angry fiancée Mira sees him holding Eurydice. She hurls a rock at him and it hits him in the head: he staggers and falls to his death. Orpheus and Eurydice are reunited after all. Benedito’s friend Zeca plays Orfeu’s guitar as dawn breaks. Orfeu, they believe, could make the sun rise with his playing, so now Zeca must do the same. A little girl watches him and says, You are Orfeu now. We can only hope that his story will have a happier ending.
Black Orpheus received huge acclaim on its release: it won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1959 and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film the following year. The bossa nova soundtrack alone can banish any thoughts of gloom: the merging of Greek myth with Brazilian music works perfectly. It is full of witty references and allegory （Orfeu’s friend is called Hermes: he’s the one who guides Eurydice to her cousin’s house, like his Greek namesake, who is both messenger god and psychopomp – a deity who escorts souls down to the Underworld）。 And it allows Eurydice to take up as much narrative space as Orpheus, which is rare in any telling of their story before this point. The early parts of the film alternate between her and Orfeu: we follow her off the boat, watch as she helps a blind man to find his bearings, see the way her cousin and the whole neighbourhood take her in. This is intercut with Orfeu and his girlfriend, Mira, who is determined that he should buy her a wedding ring, even though his eyes are on reclaiming his guitar from the pawn shop: the one love he does successfully retrieve. Orpheus and Eurydice’s story has more dramatic weight because we see both of them as characters, rather than one character and his muse （which is how they are portrayed so frequently in opera）。 Because we encounter the idea that they are destined to be lovers, destined to die – they might be this generation’s Orpheus and Eurydice, but there have been many more before them and there are countless more to come – we need a sense of them as individuals if we are not to see them as cogs in a sad machine. The vibrancy and complexity of the music, costumes and dance which accompany the familiar tale turn it into something more than a tragedy.