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Sternberg's Anatahan is a precursor, Fellini's Intervista the beneficiary. "A petrifying fountain of thought," cinema, also "an admirable vehicle for poetry," Jean Cocteau takes one last ride. Life's scrambled chronology mildly irks the peruked time-traveler, the special bullet he seeks summons the filmmaker resurrected to wander the wasteland of his own creation. "I've heard that sentence before." "You wrote it." Gypsies and centaurs, reincarnations and doppelgängers, old tricks and Nouvelle Vagues. (Not for nothing is Jean-Pierre Léaud in a classroom miming astonishment at a Méliès disappearing act.) "Works dream of killing their authors," thus Orphée at the valedictory's center, the Princess (María Casares) and Heurtebise (François Périer) at the cinéaste's tribunal and Edouard Dermithe as both Cégeste and adopted son. Pensée at the ready, Cocteau faces them with wry serenity while revealing a hitherto unsuspected resemblance to Edward Everett Horton. Reverse motion unburns a photograph and restores a flower's petals, an affecting nudity of mise en scène fit for the self-described spiritual striptease, not a crumbling chimney (Le Sang d'un poète) but a bubble of smoke. "Amoureux intellectuels" (cf. Wilder's Love in the Afternoon), the autograph-eating machine out of Tashlin to predict Warhol's famous dictum. The artist's condition is to helplessly paint his own portrait, "ne me demandez pas pourquoi." Yul Brynner manning the waiting room, Pablo Picasso leaning from the balcony, Charles Aznavour peeking from behind a column. Speared by the goddess Minerva, the auteur sleepwalks with painted eyelids and misses Jean Marais passing by as Oedipus. "Seventy years of trying to understand. Aren't you tired?" With one foot in the hereafter, Cocteau bids sublime adieu to a medium of evanescence and immortality. "Only pretend to weep, my friends, since poets only pretend to die." In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |