La Belle et la Bête (no 25) *****

 

by Allan Fish

(France 1946 94m) DVD1/2

Aka. Beauty and the Beast

Va, va, Magnifique!

p  André Paulvé  d/w  Jean Cocteau  story  Mme.le Prince de Beaumont  ph  Henri Alekan  ed  Claude Iberia  m  Georges Auric  art  Christian Bérard  cos  Marcel Escoffier, Castillo  creative consultant  René Clément

Jean Marais (Avenant/The Beast), Josette Day (Belle), Mila Parèly (Adelaide), Marcel André (Merchant), Nane Germon (Félice), Michel Auclair (Ludovic), Raoul Marco,

“Children believe in the stories they are told; they have complete faith” the opening caption to Cocteau’s fantasy masterpiece states.  From there, we are in familiar territory, asked to call upon that lost sense of childhood to see through the eyes of innocent wonder.  But one might also repeat the call of Chorus in Henry V, “on your imaginary forces work“, for this truly is the cinema of imagination.  To quote once more that opening caption, “let me pronounce four magic words, that veritable Open Sesame, once upon a time…”

            The story of Mme.le Prince de Beaumont’s fairy tale is well enough known to gloss over here, and the opening sequences owe as much to Cinderella as Beaumont’s original.  Yet they owe much to the cinema of imagination, too.  Essences of classics as varied as Die Nibelungen, Frankenstein, King Kong, Les Misérables and Disney’s Snow White are there, not to mention the Orphic films of Cocteau’s own oeuvre.  Yet Belle is out on its own in Cocteau’s canon, a fantasy quite unlike any other.  Has there ever been an enchanted castle such as this?  As forbidding as it is intoxicating, with its disembodied arms holding candelabras that alight themselves, tears that turn to diamonds, busts whose heads come alive, magical gloves that smoke when used, an elaborate staircase overgrown with ivy, a misty forest worthy of the Brothers Grimm where thunder crashes down ad infinitum and a truly magnificent magical horse.  Not to mention drapes that willow in the breeze along ghostly corridors too gorgeous to describe.

            Of course at its heart, the moral of the story is that old chestnut “beauty is only skin deep.”  An epithet long since dismissed as baloney but still one we’d like to believe in.  In the movies such sentiments can find a place where they virtually never do in reality and there never were a beauty and a beast like Cocteau’s.  Disney’s version may have revitalised the nearly dying animated feature by setting it to music, but there is no doubt where most of the best visual touches came from; Cocteau’s original.  What’s more, in magical awe Cocteau’s movie still wins hands down.  In a dual role, Marais contrasts a rather dull Avenant with a magnetic beast, hiding his Nordic looks under a make up and costume straight out of a fairy tale illustration, his long wizardly cloak and almost impossibly high ruff disguising the shame of his hideousness.  At first one fears for Belle as she is carried to a bed by the rapacious beast.  It would not have been unthinkable for him to have raped her, had we not known the story inside out.  With his throaty voice and impassioned eyes Marais is one of the great monsters to pity.  Matching him scene for scene is Day (who came to prominence a decade earlier as one of the Club de Femmes) as Belle, a buxom, feisty wench who lives up to her name in a very natural manner, never looking lovelier.  And if the rest of the cast seem little more than ciphers, that’s precisely Cocteau’s intention, as such is as it is in the tales we are told in childhood, tales where everything is black and white and where Cocteau and Alekan’s shimmering monochrome could not have been more appropriate or more radiant.  Indeed Alekan is due much praise for his work, ditto Auric for his haunting score, Clément for his technical assistance (he was effectively co-director) and, particularly, Bérard for his amazing set designs and visual input.  Between them they conjure up the cinema’s greatest impression of childlike wonder.  When the dying beast murmurs “poor beasts who wish to prove their love can do no more than lie down and die“, we feel his pain.  But when he transforms to handsome prince, one feels sympathy with Marlene Dietrich who, watching in Paris, shouted out “where is my beautiful beast?”  The answer is, of course, that he’s in all of us.