When this film was released it sharply divided the critics in its depiction of the favelas. Those who loved it praised French filmmaker Marcel Camus for bringing the colors, culture & music of Rio to European & American audiences for the first time. Those who hated it attacked it for failing to depict the realism of poverty. Remember, this was 1959 when realism and the New Wave were getting a strong foothold in Europe with films like The 400 Blows and Breathless (which both lost to Black Orpheus at Cannes).

I see the haters’ point. This movie really glamorizes the favelas in its portrayal of everyone constantly smiling and every shack overlooking the sea with glorious panoramic views. It comes across like a travel brochure. But I think it works on an artistic & storytelling level, and I can’t imagine it working any other way.

I mean, if your main goal is to make a social statement, then sure you should go all the way and make a gritty drama like City of God which shows the favelas in all their stinky glory. But at the heart of this tale is a love story, an ancient Greek myth steeped in fantasy. If the filmmakers had jumbled it up with a contemporary social statement, or worse, a voyeuristic tear jerker about how ‘the other half’ lives, it would be fighting against itself.

As it is, the favelas are shown on some fantasy plane of existence that’s clearly not part of the city, not 'reality', and I think that works better than showing the ugliness of poverty & social division from the city folk. When Orpheus journeys into the city—that memorable scene at the bureau of missing persons which turns out to be an enormous bureaucratic structure that's completely empty except for a janitor sweeping up—that really drives the point home that he’s not welcome in 'clean' Rio. The hospital staff treats him with passive contempt, and the police are always shown as a menacing presence, except when by pure chance the cop recognizes him and lets him pass. And what really drives the point home is the scene at the morgue freezer: a room full of unclaimed corpses where the attendant casually tells Orpheus that it would be cheaper for the families to donate the bodies to science than to retrieve them for burial. To me that's enough to acknowledge the social hardship of poverty without shoving squalor & misery in our face.