This past weekend, Turner Classic Movies broadcast, as part of its series called "The Essentials", the film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 1960.

Set in the city of Rio de Janeiro during Carnaval, Orfeu Negro presents a unique and beautiful retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In that myth, Eurydice marries Orpheus, but is fatally bitten by a snake on her wedding day.  In his grief, Orpheus travels to the underworld, where his singing and playing of the lyre convinces Hades to allow Eurydice to return to the world of the living.  The only condition is that she walk behind Orpheus and that he refrain from looking at her until they have both returned to the upper world.  When Orpheus arrives, he cannot help but turn back to gaze upon his beloved, but she has not yet reached the safe place.  She is taken back to Hades, never to return.

The film's stars, Breno Mello as Orpheus, and Marpessa Dawn as Eurydice, are possibly two of the most gorgeous and appealing people ever captured on film. (In an interesting twist of fate, Mello and Dawn both died in 2008, a mere six weeks apart, he in Brazil and she in Paris.)  Orpheus' smile is as dazzling as the sun that the children believe he causes to rise every morning, and the shy country girl Eurydice practically glows as she falls in love with him.

The story of their tragic romance is told in such a way that you cannot help but recognize the elements of the original myth, but with some events changed to fit the more modern time and place.  For example, instead of being bitten by a snake, Eurydice is electrocuted as Orpheus tries to rescue her from Death (who appears to everyone else to be just another costumed reveler) in the depot where the streetcar that he drives is kept.  His descent into the underworld is depicted by his walking down an enormous circular staircase in a faceless bureaucratic government building stuffed with piles of missing persons reports.  And instead of playing the lyre, Orpheus plays the samba on an acoustic guitar that he has just retrieved from a pawn shop.

Even if it had achieved nothing else, Orfeu Negro would stand as an irreplaceable historical documentation of the people, the music and the dancing of the hillside shanty towns, or favelas, of Rio de Janeiro. Extended parade and dance sequences, like this one, convey the wild abandon, but almost trancelike state, of samba dancing.

The absolute poverty of the residents of the favela is somewhat romanticized, though, as they all seem to be very happy-go-lucky people who are more than willing to spend their grocery money on elaborate costumes for the Carnaval celebration.  (But maybe that's understandable if it's the one exciting and glamorous event you have to look forward to all year.) Still, the charm is irresistible and the music is unforgettable.  This is the film that introduced many Americans to the sounds of the bossa nova and some of the compositions of Antonio Carlos Jobim.

Of course, watching this movie made all the more poignant the devastating news out of Brazil of the recent catastrophic flooding, which has washed away many of these hillside villages and caused the deaths of over 700 people so far, along with making thousands homeless. Having seen flooding here in Nashville last May, albeit on a much less horrific scale, I wondered how much of what I had seen in the film had been destroyed, and if any of the people I had seen or their family members had been affected.

Doctors Without Borders is working in the flooded areas and is accepting donations.  There have been so many floods this year.  The misery left behind will be with us for a long, long time.  It is certainly  the stuff of Greek tragedy.

I'll leave you with this, the last two minutes of Orfeu Negro, which I think is one of the most innocent and joyous scenes ever filmed.  I hope that there will one day be children dancing again on those hillsides.