THE CAST – Luca Vergoni, Giulia Maenza, Aomi Muyock, & Vinicio Marchioni

THE TEAM – Virgilio Villoresi (Director/Writer) & Albert Fornari (Writer)

THE RUNNING TIME – 74 Minutes

“On Via Saterna, in the old city, there is a villa with a large garden.” So our narrator begins, and the camera glides toward a manor built in miniature, plain on the outside and abandoned for years. Like Dorian’s portrait, it seems to shift every time you look: cracks in the façade, a blur at the edge of the eye, a place that invites curiosity and perhaps something darker. Rumor says a misanthropic, dissolute man lives inside, one who lured young women with promises of jewels and the glitter of gold. The narrator lives across the street and admits the villa stirred something in him as a boy. Around the house sits an Italy of crime and punishment, but the story he tells is one of love, loss, and the unknown. This story is “Orfeo,” Virgilio Villoresi’s feature debut and a retelling of the Orpheus myth. It is an adaptation of an adaptation, drawn from Dino Buzzati’s 1969 graphic novel “Poema a fumetti.” It is also one of the most visually inventive films of the year, but it’s easier to admire than it is to be fully taken into its grasp.

Orfeo (Luca Vergoni), a pianist with piercing ocean-blue eyes, is the narrator. At the Polypus, the club where he plays his beloved piano, his gaze meets that of a young woman. Eura (Giulia Maenza) is a dancer in a “Swan Lake” ensemble, and the night they meet is the one that changes everything. The setting is as enchanting as the pair, with dim lighting and cinematography that perfectly toys with shadow, capturing the tone and feeling of their affections, and dialogue that is just as poetic. Anyone who knows the myth will sense the tragedy coming, which only deepens the mood.

When Orfeo gives Eura a ring with a green stone, a blaring horn interrupts the moment, like the chime of Hades’s clock. It has no visible source and arrives at the peak of their love. Then comes a high before the fall: birds swarm into shapes in the morning light, as if dancing across the sky, and you can almost make out the lovers’ image, floating as they waltz. The sweeping score captures both romance and melancholy, reflecting the intensity of love throughout. Almost as quickly as it began, their romance seems to have met its end as Eura stops answering when he calls.

Eura’s absence brings a lull, broken by a nightmare where the film’s incorporation of animation really comes to play. Naked devils drop from the sky onto an American West setting, past a horse-drawn carriage with a skeletal passenger. The meaning of these devils, as they take human form, can only be read as a preview of the underworld to come. Upon waking from this dream, Orfeo sees Eura as a ghost, slipping through the door into the villa’s courtyard. A man on the street tells him such doors open on nights when people die. Orfeo pushes into the dark after her.

In its darkest stretches, the film tips toward horror, with a mix of Tim Burton and a splash of Dario Argento. In a forest, creatures that look like floating heads tell Orfeo he doesn’t belong and that the villa is a gateway that will change him forever. It’s cool and weird, and Vergoni sells the fear and conflict over moving forward. But in the end, Orfeo doesn’t care about the risk. He has to find his love.

Inside, the villa shows him moments that have passed and moments that could have been. He finds himself in Dante’s prose, in an afterlife trapped in his memories, searching endlessly with time standing still or looping to remember something. He faces temptation and holds firm. A guardian – a floating jacket – warns he’ll be stuck there if he doesn’t find a horn and play it to lead both him and Eura out of hell. It’s a man facing his own death for the woman he loves.

This story of love and loss is a tale as old as time, but the craft on display is the film’s real draw. Surrealism runs through every frame as Orfeo crosses into the unknown. Shot on 16mm, it features large and miniature hand-built sets, classic optical illusions, and 2D and stop-motion animation. Villoresi has described cinema as “a place of dreams,” and the film follows dream logic rather than a conventional plot. The production, costume design, and cinematography have the richness of a Milan opera, settings that are exquisite, and the film is composed like the notes of a song. Real Milan appears mostly in nighttime aerial shots, adding to the romance. Everyone on screen is easy on the eyes, too. You can date the world loosely from clues like 1930s photos of Joan Crawford and Ginger Rogers in Orfeo’s cabin, yet it doesn’t feel tied to any single era.

However, this dreamlike fantasy is a lot to digest. You can feel as lost and confused as Orfeo, which may be the point, but being overwhelmed is not the same as being engrossed. You can either sink into the film’s beauty or just as easily be confounded by it. Some changes to the myth, likely inherited from the source material, are strange. Eura’s death at the hands of a spider-like robot creature is one of them. Eura is largely the object of male desire, and that remains unchanged, with Maenza getting far less to do than Vergoni. The ending also lands without fire. The film calls Eura a ghost of his regret, but at no point do you feel what he could regret. Perhaps it’s the regret of time lost, but it would make more sense had the film kept the myth’s real ending with the regret of not waiting, which is absent here. It never hits the way “Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s” take does.

Still, the closing idea – that the afterlife is not a place but a dream that watches you – is striking, and there is certainly a lot to admire here. It’s arresting to look at, with performances that keep its eccentricities grounded, and you can’t help but be eager to see what world Villoresi builds next.

The post “ORFEO” appeared first on Next Best Picture.