Testament of Orpheus (1960, Jean Cocteau) (Patreon)

57/100

Given how much I love both The Blood of a Poet and Orpheus, it's weird that I waited so long to finally watch the third part of Cocteau's trilogy (especially since I've owned the Criterion box set for ages). Maybe I accurately got the sense that it's more an auteurist curiosity than a traditional film—imagine The House That Jack Built's final section, but at feature length and with Von Trier himself playing the lead role. Cocteau's elegiac self-reckoning and musings on the nature of art (or "poetry," as he apparently called its every permutation) don't particularly interest me for their own sake, and are likely better served by his prose in any case; Testament really bogs down during its lengthy tribunal sequence, which I'm not sure I'd even have followed had I not revisited Orpheus quite recently. But I remain oddly transfixed by his use of slow motion, reversed footage, and other simple but effective alienation devices. Cocteau painstakingly "assembling" a flower, petal by petal, works beautifully even though it's obvious that we're actually watching him pull it apart, in the same way that recognizing the method Lynch employed for Twin Peaks' dream dialogue doesn't make hearing it any less uncanny. Stunning use of locations, too—I was amused, but not surprised, to find that the caves seen toward the end (and guarded, for no apparent reason but honestly who cares, by Yul Brynner) are from a region of France called Val d'Enfer, i.e. Hell Valley. In short: easily my least favorite Cocteau (though Beauty and the Beast is the only one I've seen apart from this trilogy), but probably in my 90th percentile for Cinema As Closing Argument.