So this is a movie that’s set in Brazil (specifically in Rio during Carnival) and where the actors speak Portuguese, but it’s not a Brazilian movie — it’s directed by a (white) French dude (Marcel Camus) and its female lead is American.

And it matters in this instance, because this movie is doing that thing where it exoticizes and romanticizes a culture — the poor people who are its protagonists live in simple but picturesque buildings on hilltops with stunning views; Rio is a riot of color and dancing and non-stop music. And this could just be because it’s a kind of mythic allegory and it’s working in a kind of mythic mood; and if it were directed by a Brazilian, I’d trust that explanation. But a French dude in 1959 gets the eyebrow raise. (Wikipedia quotes Obama talking with some skepticism about how it was his mom’s favorite movie: “I suddenly realized that the depiction of the childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad’s dark savages, was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white, middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.”)

But so yeah, what it’s doing is a retelling of sort of the Orpheus myth. The first part of the movie is the love story part of it: Orpheus gets engaged to this girl, and the clerk makes a joke about how her name should be Eurydice, because of the myth and all. Meanwhile, a young girl makes her way to Rio to stay with her cousin. She meets Orpheus and her name is, yep you guessed it, Eurydice.

So it turns out Eurydice is fleeing her farm because a man has been chasing her. And you naturally assume some kind of harassment-y situation, but it turns out the man is the personification of death (shown by him being dressed in a kind of skeleton costume, one of those skintight black-and-white numbers). Orpheus fends off the skeleton man’s attack, and they fall in love and he ditches the other girl (who is not pleased).

Then, during a parade at Carnival, where they are dancing together, the skeleton man comes for Eurydice, and she flees off to an empty building, where there is one of these tense horror scenes as he chases her.

The place where this movie really excels is the soundtrack: The music in Rio, ever-present, apparently kicked off a bossa nova craze in the US; but as soon as we get to this empty building, all the music stops dead, and the movie is utterly silent except for Eurydice’s footsteps as she tries to hide and run from the skeleton man.

But of course she has to die, and then we follow Orpheus as he tries to find her, going first to the “missing persons” department, which turns out to be a large, empty building with rooms and rooms full of stacks of paper blowing in the wind and a mystical janitor who tells Orpheus that he won’t find her there, and proceeds to guide him through a gate (guarded by a dog named Cerberus) to a church where there’s a bunch of chanting, and people fall to the ground and start screaming as they’re “possessed by spirits” and Eurydice speaks to Orpheus from behind, telling him he can’t turn around and look at her or she’ll go away forever. He does, of course, and… she’s not Eurydice, she’s another woman who was possibly (the movie delights in the ambiguity of its supernatural events) possessed by Eurydice, or not.

From there tragedy plays out further and Orpheus ends up dead (killed by his jilted lover), but the movie’s last scene is children playing music and dancing as the sun rises.

So yeah, it’s heavy-handed with its allegory, it’s more than slightly dubious in its cultural appropriation, and I don’t think it would today win the awards it won then (a Palme d’Or at Cannes, the best foreign film Oscar), although awards are random so who knows. But the music — composed by legit Brazilian musicians for the film — still stands up, and the eerie scenes of death near the end retain their tense chilliness.