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The Appropriate Tune: "The Beast", by Fugees
Fairy tales are a weird thing. Originally they served as a sort of medieval after school special, teaching kids things like ‘listen to instructions or you will fucking die’, or ‘don’t talk to strangers or you will fucking die’, and in particular ‘step parents aren’t your real parents and they will never love you’. Important life lessons in the days when getting a cold was a life-or-death scenario and 12 years old was considered the prime marrying age, but in modern times those lessons have become largely obsolete, and it’s nature as an oral tradition have likewise ceased to exist. We still keep ‘em around of course, but it’s less about what those stories teach these days than it is how we can spin them. What if Red Riding Hood was an anime? How about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves as a raunchy sex comedy? They have become as clay, molded and remolded a million times over, which would surely be a living hell if they were sentient. But they aren’t so whatever.
Released in 1946 through DisCina, Beauty and the Beast was written and directed by French director Jean Cocteau in his third time behind the camera. An adaptation of Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s adaptation of the 1740 story by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Josette Day plays Belle, a beautiful young girl who is forced into domestic work by her horrible sisters when her family falls into financial troubles. One day her father goes into town on the prospect of riches he asks his daughters what they would like as gifts. Her sisters, being your standard gold diggers ask for jewelry and other luxuries, but Belle asks for but a single rose. Because she’s the protagonist you see, and being humble is very marketable.
Well the deal falls through, and as the father makes the journey he is set upon by a great storm and ends up lost in a forest. Things seem grim, until he manages to stumble upon a mysterious castle. He is given a meal and a nice rest (although he never sees anyone do it), but when he picks a rose from the garden he is immediately set upon by the owner of the castle, known only as the Beast (played by Jean Marais). Beast condemns the man to death for the heinous crime of doing something innocuous that he couldn’t possibly know was wrong, but being a reasonable sort of guy he offers him a deal: Give me one of your daughters and you get to live. Which the father refuses to do, but Belle decides to sacrifice herself and sneaks off to the castle, because selflessness is also very marketable. So begins the cohabitation between the beautiful Belle and the fearsome Beast, but will this really be the nightmare she has been led to believe? Or is there a spark of something more there?
As someone who grew up during the so-called Disney Renaissance of the 1990’s, it’s hard not to make comparisons between this Beauty and the Beast and the animated adaptation put out by DIsney during that time. Especially as there are certain elements that feature in both works, such as Beast’s leonine traits and a rival for Belle’s affections who are kind of ‘sexual assaulty’ (Gaston for Disney and Avenant in the Cocteau). While there may be an attitude among some to side with the older film just because it’s older, or because it’s closer to the source material, but in watching this film I found that Disney’s changes actually made sense. Taking out the whole wicked sisters angle was good, keeps things from feeling too derivative, and making Belle into a bookworm gave her some characteristics beyond ‘meek maiden’. More importantly though, where the Disney adaptation rings true is its focus on building the relationship between Belle and Beast. I mean let’s face it, Beauty and the Beast is ultimately a really creepy story, and the only way to make it palatable is to tone down the death threats, extortion and Stockholm Syndrome aspects. Which Cocteau’s version doesn't really do at all; If anything he makes Beast feel like even more of a creepy stalker than before, and he spends more time making the two walk slowly down hallways in silence than he does building a solid foundation for a relationship. She pities him sure, in one of the few conversations they have where he’s not pressuring her to marry him, but I don’t think pity is the same thing as love. Plus there’s this whole thing with Avenant and Beast near the end of the film which just comes across as weird and maybe a little gross. I don’t know if it was in the original Beaumont story, but it feels awkward and jams up the flow of the scene in my opinion, so I think Cocteau would have been better off changing it. The movie’s nearly a century old by this point though, so he might want to hurry up.
Where Cocteau excels at in this film is in capturing the essence of the fairy tale, and really playing into the duality of the thing. The living furniture is the pinnacle of that, both elegant and grotesque, but really the entire castle is locked within contradictions. Belle’s bedroom which has been overtaken by greenery, elegant architecture marred with images of dragons and monsters, and so on. This is also apparent in his use of shadowplay; the darkness is so intense that I wouldn’t be surprised if he had physically painted things black in order to draw any potential light out of the scene, like the inky void in space that is the dining area, save for a fireplace and tiny Edwardian table. All of it serves to heighten the surreality of the story, of the fantastical coming against the visceral. When Belle first explores the castle she doesn’t walk down the halls she glides, and this isn’t out of place because she has stepped into the dream.
I also appreciate the fact that Cocteau injected some humor here and there. He pays a lot of lip service to the innocence of children at the beginning of the film, and I believe he recognized that, as a children’s story, the film needed a bit of levity to break up the sturm und drang. A lesson that constantly needs to be relearned in this day and age. It also gives the sister characters something to do, quite frankly, as they’re largely superfluous compared to Avenant or even the brother character Ludovico.
Nothing much to say about the acting. I found Josette Day’s performance as Belle to be fine, she was arguably a bit too old to be playing a maiden at that point but she got the point of Belle across. I really wasn’t all that impressed with Jean Marais as the Beast however. To his credit the Beast makeup requires him to do a lot of acting with his eyes and when he’s not talking he’s not too far removed from Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolf-Man, but then he opens his mouth and his high-pitched, raspy voice marrs the whole thing. Combined with his whole ‘marry me or I’ll die of loneliness’ schtick he comes across as one of those guys who complains that the gamer girl bath water he ordered isn’t 100% authentic. Neither looking or sounding like someone you’d actually want to be in a relationship, outside of certain circles of the internet.
Ultimately though I will give Beauty and the Beast the recommendation. Finding an adaptation of a fairy tale isn’t exactly difficult, but I think Cocteau’s unsettling, avant garde direction gives his film a unique quality that sets it apart from others. For those who want their children’s stories with a bit of an edge to it, or are interested in seeing the early years of one of France’s great filmmakers, this is a film worth checking out this Halloween. Or on a date, but I don’t think there are that many dates going on right now.
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