It just occurred to me that Johann Peter Hebel's amazing story "Unexpected Reunion" -- which Kafka famously called "the most wonderful story in the world -- is a version of Orpheus and Eurydice. Or perhaps it might be called Eurydice and Orpheus, with all such a converse might apply. At any rate it's the Eurydice figure who turns back, Eurydice who's been exiled in this world for all those years.
Ophuls' Black Orpheus, problematic as its real world construction is (for short: not the fact that it depicts an exotic celebration per se, but the exoticization of the actors), is still a brilliant and beautiful movie, and its most brilliant part is what Orpheus sees when he turns back: Eurydice as a very old woman. What he sees is the truth of marriage, time, aging, death. A truth, anyhow: the other truth is that these things are okay if one doesn't turn back, doesn't seek to turn back.
In Hebel's story, too, the woman becomes very old, in her vast separation from her "young husband" ("θαλερὸς παρακοίτης," as Andromake calls Hektor). But it is she who turns back to see his youth, and to mourn their lives and their parting, she who is more Eurydice than ever.
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