In Cocteau's dream-like, personal version of the legend of Orpheus, the Princess of Death (Maria Casarès) travels in a Rolls Royce, receives her instructions in code via radio, and is escorted in her travels between this world and the next by an entourage of living-dead, leather-clad motorcyclists. Orphée (Jean Marais) is a successful French poet who, on hearing these strange radio messages, becomes fascinated by them and determines to discover their secret for himself. Cocteau's masterly photography (through which he creates an imaginary town out of Paris locations) draws the viewer into the poet's fascination with the tension between the real world and the world of the imagination. Cocteau has stated: “I tried to use the camera not like a pen, but like ink. I interwove many myths. It is a drama of the visible and the invisible.”
Jean-Luc Godard, whose Alphaville contains echoes of Orphée, writes: “Orphée: a documentary where it is established, chronicled once and for all, that poetry is a craft for mortals and therefore mortally dangerous.”