Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau 💖, documentary, dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland, 2024, USA, 94 min., in English and French
Thursday, June 26, 1:00 pm, Vogue Theatre

Jean Cocteau
© Boris Lipnitzki

Imagine putting on a production of a play you’ve written. The sets will be designed and built by Pablo Picasso, the costumes by Coco Chanel. Jean Cocteau was a poet, first and foremost, but also a writer, an artist, a playwright, and a filmmaker, and that’s not even a complete list. Add to that a little thing called World Wars I and II dropped into the middle of his career, plus a typhoid fever outbreak, amid both critical success and scorn, going so far as death threats over one of his plays.

His romantic life was mostly private, but included both men and women. He wrote openly about his adolescent awakening to the attraction to other boys, and as an adult had a few long-term live-in boyfriends, but he was not exclusively gay.

Jean Cocteau often spoke directly to the camera, and in an interview not long before his death in 1963, he spoke directly to the children of the year 2000. Several of those interviews and on-camera musings are interwoven with pictures from his life, with a voiceover narrator tying them together.

Cocteau was a remarkable artist, far more influential than his usual modesty might suggest. [Wikipedia on Cocteau]. This biopic is engaging and insightful, illuminating a singularly influential figure in 20th century arts and letters who happened to be bisexual. It’s a must see.

Note: The film’s ascription of Cocteau’s opium addiction to the sudden death of his protege, Raymond Radiguet, is controversial. Cocteau himself said the timing was coincidental.

• IMDb • trailer • official website • in-depth review (Gagosian Quarterly) •