MovieChat Forums > Les anges exterminateurs (2006) Discussion > references to Orphée

references to Orphée

posted 17 years ago by stuart-85
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I don't know that this will help anybody to make more sense of this movie, but there are several references to Jean Cocteau's Orphée in it. First of all, the mysterious off-screen lines that are heard from time to time are just like the messages that Orphée receives on his car radio, including the "une fois" or "deux fois" at the end of each line. Also, on occasion, the way the 'angels' are lit is very similar to the way Death is lit in Cocteau's film. Does this make the film more meaningful to anyone?

[–] ThreeSadTigers 9 years ago

Also at the beginning of the film the camera passes through a doorway into another realm and then back again into a different one. At the end the camera once again goes through a doorway into a black space.

There's a lot of doorway symbolism in Cocteau's Blood of a Poet and also The Testament of Orpheus, where each new "room" represents a different level of consciousness.

The director also said he was influenced by 2001: A Spacey Odyssey and the idea of a character entering a room in which they observe scenes from their own life, but in some way removed from them.