La Belle et la Bête

A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #6: Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête.

At the present moment, a film that goes against aver­age taste gets few book­ings in France, and out­side of some ambi­tious pic­tures under­taken to main­tain pres­tige, pro­duc­tion is almost at a stand­still and the stu­dios deserted. A poet engaged in film work must face another great dif­fi­culty: the imme­di­ate results demanded of a motion pic­ture. A book can wait. A play that has flopped may be revived. A film must please at once, and we there­fore have to devise ways to please and dis­please at the same time. There has never yet been an instance of some­thing new not baf­fling the esthetes, the crit­ics and the pub­lic, lazily accept­ing famil­iar for­mu­las. The least chal­lenge is apt to awaken a bru­tal and unpleas­ant response.

—Jean Cocteau

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Cocteau’s com­plaint about post war France is just as applic­a­ble to film cul­ture today as it was then, and it also pro­vides a good spring­board to the role of the folk/fairy tale as a means of keep­ing things the same as they change.

Beauty and the Beast starts out with an elo­quent plea from Cocteau to his adult audi­ence. He encour­ages them to watch the film as if they were still chil­dren, basi­cally a request to sus­pend their dis­be­lief as they watch the film. I found this to be some­what humor­ous, since Méliès [one of my favorite film­mak­ers] required a much larger sus­pen­sion with­out the dis­claimer. Of course, by the time Cocteau was doing his film thing, the indus­try had actu­ally become an indus­try and audi­ences expected to see films instead of tech­no­log­i­cal trick­ery. So the more things change the more they change. Cocteau

decided to make a film that would be a fairy tale, and when [he] chose the one that is the least fairy-like—which is to say the one that would need to make the least use of mod­ern cin­ema techniques

he essen­tially arrived at a posi­tion where inge­nious use of the­atri­cal inge­nu­ity replaced most cin­e­matic spe­cial effects. There are a few cam­era tricks, of course, but noth­ing that hadn’t been seen before. In fact, at the end, as the Belle et la Bête fly off into the sky, you can actu­ally see the frame over­lays thanks to the restored print. Where the set can be fully con­trolled, the cin­e­matog­ra­phy is out­stand­ing. The musi­cal score got on my nerves, because it seemed a bit over the top. Mise en scene is where the film excels, as well as Jean Marais’s act­ing abil­ity. He really nails the split per­son­al­i­ties of a noble man wrestling with a beast’s nature.

Now we can bring in the story of Beauty and the Beast itself. Like most tra­di­tional tales, it has a moral: you can’t judge a book by its cover; and like most tra­di­tional tales, it serves as a means of per­pet­u­at­ing basic cul­tural val­ues. This is a curi­ous basis for a story that Cocteau assumes orig­i­nated in Scot­land and is mar­ket­ing to an Amer­i­can audi­ence. Why do Beauty and the Beast then? Was it just an exer­cise for Cocteau? Well, maybe, but exer­cise is good for you, and Cocteau is pro­mot­ing the child­like sense of won­der that is so close to my heart.

An argu­ment could prob­a­bly be made that La Belle et la Bête served an impor­tant role in redefin­ing French cul­ture after World War II, but I don’t think all things must be more than they are. I’m will­ing to take Cocteau’s intent as noth­ing more than a desire to enter­tain and amaze. Which, when done well, is a higher order of expe­ri­ence anyway.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Fran­cis Steeg­muller
• Cri­te­rion Essay by Jean Cocteau
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.