Perhaps the most tell-tale tip-off to the nature of the "Orpheus" of Jean Cocteau … is thoughtfully offered by the author in a signed statement in the program: "When I make a film," says M. Cocteau, "it is a slumber and I dream."

That is as fair a forewarning as any that we can provide to the curious conceits of fancy that you may expect in this film. For plainly the writer-director has let his imagination roam through a drama of images that resemble the vagrant phantasms of sleep. And while the famed legend of Orpheus provides the framework of a plot and the pictorial character is concrete, the context is utterly abstract.

Indeed, at one point in this crisscross of phantoms and images, which clearly defy interpretation along any logical line, the author permits one character to drop this significant remark: "You try too hard to understand and...