This film is about a young and beautiful woman, Eurydice, running away from home because Death kept threatening her. She stayed at her cousin Serafina’s house and there she grew to love Orpheus, a guitar playing, Romeo who was engaged to marry Mira. At Carnaval, Death gets to Eurydice, and Orpheus is heartbroken as he carries her corpse back home. Mira, having found out about Orpheus’ affair, throws stones at him and he falls over a cliff and dies, embraced to his love. This is a French-directed film, based on a Brazilian play, based on a Greek myth. This opens up the film to criticism about the Eurocentric view of Afro-Brazilians.

A clearly Eurocentric point of view the Afro-Brazilian people is how they were depicted as jovial, street vendors who were constantly dancing to and playing music. Even in the opening scene on the boat, everyone was dancing as the ship was docking. This coincides exactly with Freyre’s idea of people of African descent, and how this jovial culture adds to the value of Brazilian culture as a whole. Another critique is how the women were portrayed; they were fiery, sensual beings as depicted by the strange foreplay Serafina partook in and by Mira’s constantly displayed cleavage. Again, Freyre wrote at length about the sensuality and eroticism of the slaves brought over from Africa, and how the Portuguese focused on bringing over beautiful slaves so as to populate the empty lands of Brazil with beautiful, mixed babies. Finally, the way poor people in Brazil were depicted was Eurocentric. These people were wasting what little money they had on Carnaval costumes instead of food. Yes, this does occur in real life, but there are reasons for such “madness”. They are buying into the illusion of that day; at Carnaval you can be anyone, even the King, for a day and escape the oppression of poverty. A poverty, as Fernandes claimed, that is imposed on the people through systemic racism. The racial inequality present in Brazil could even be seen in the costumes chosen for Carnaval. The people of Day were dressed in French colonial garb whereas the people of Night were dressed in African clothing. One usually associates Day/Light with Goodness and Night/Dark with Evil, thus perpetuating racial ideologies in a subtle way.

Concerning cinematography, the use of color was integral to the film. When Eurydice arrived, she was adorned with a yellow necklace. The camera then zoomed in on a yellow canary, representative of Eurydice, in a cage with black crows, representative of Death. Then the scene skips to Serafina, and her own yellow canary is acting up. Canaries sense dangerous levels of toxins in the air, and were used in coalmines for years, but Serafina’s canary was sensing the impending danger of Death. The red lights represented the Underworld, which was depicted as a favela in Brazil, which many would consider an accurate comparison. Overall, I felt that this was an interesting film that successfully put a modern twist on an old Greek myth.