NR | 1 h 33 min | Drama, Fantasy | 1946
Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont equates beauty with truth and goodness in her 18th-century fairy tale, “La Belle et la Bête.” Jean Cocteau’s film “Beauty and the Beast” tells the enchanting story in a magical way.
A wandering merchant (Marcel André) steals a rose from a mysterious castle in a forest, where he’d sought shelter. His pleas that the rose is for his daughter Belle (Josette Day) do little to pacify the terrifying lone resident and castle owner, Beast (Jean Marais). Beast frees him only after assurances that he’ll return to die at Beast’s hands or surrender his daughter instead.
Belle’s desperate to spare her father but everyone else back home eyes his riches: haughty sisters (Nane Germon and Mila Parély) who’ve made her slave like a poor maid, her weakling brother (Michel Auclair), and her father’s creditors. Handsome Avenant (also Jean Marais) has one eye on lovely Belle, but the other on riches—her father’s, for now.
A Restrained Fantasy
Screenwriter-director Jean Cocteau’s cast, soundtrack, cinematography, and costuming shine because he and his team exercise a restraint that’s rare in the romantic-fantasy genre.Magically, Marais morphs from scheming Avenant to pitiable Beast. His smoldering eyes express the tormented soul of Beast, a tragic figure, silently pacing his castle, beating his breast, staggering from room to room, pining for love, but believing he doesn’t deserve it. His otherwise thundering voice softens when addressing Belle. When asking if she’ll marry him, he fidgets with his sparkling amulet, his whole being shuddering with seemingly futile longing, but with a sliver of expectation just the same.
Beast warns Belle not to look into his eyes. She disobeys. We disobey with her, gazing again and again into those eyes, losing ourselves in them. His tortured eyes fill the screen as he laps at water cupped in her hands. Then, her eyes fill the screen, no less tortured, kindred spirits in their enslavement.
Belle loves the being not with a beastly face that everyone else sees, but of beauty and goodness that only she finds in him. He becomes beautiful (himself) by being true to the beauty (goodness) he finds in her. If she found only herself beautiful in the mirror each morning, she’d remain just that: a pretty little thing. She becomes beautiful (a princess) by going beyond herself, finding beauty in others.
True Beauty
It’s because she closes her eyes to all that’s beastly that Belle sees beauty that her sisters can’t, and draws it out; even her tears turn into diamonds. It’s because her sisters close their eyes to all that’s beautiful that they see only beastliness around them, and draw it from everything they touch. Where they’re helpless, she’s powerful: She accepts another not just when it’s difficult (suave but sly Avenant), but when it’s impossible (grotesque Beast).Beaumont and Cocteau assert that love not founded on sacrifice is doomed. Sacrifice is a precondition for love, not a nice-to-have. For all her longing for it, Belle recoils when her father presents her that rose, only shakily grasping it; a cross that’s not of her making but one that she’ll bravely bear. For what rose is separate from its thorn?
Belle’s collapse when confronted by Beast, and his collapse when reunited with her, is acknowledgement that we all start out part-beauty, part-beast and part-thorn, part-rose. It’s why, in our journey through forests of self-discovery, we must die to all that’s superficial and false (beastly) in us, to awaken to the real and true (beautiful).
Belle rejects her father’s diagnosis of Beast, “That monster.” She intuits something hidden; “one half of him” struggles with the other. She discerns how man divided against himself is the ultimate falsehood, one that contorts and enslaves Beast. Isn’t that why he’s more “cruel to himself” than to others?
For all of Beast’s hideousness, Belle insists to her father with unnerving certainty, “That monster is good!” Equally wisely, she rebukes Beast’s self-flagellation with no less certainty, “There are men … more monstrous than you” even if they conceal it better.
Beast intuits, too, that powerlessness before evil may be pretended, “There is no master here but you.”
Beast and Belle might, after all, not be two beings in dialogue, but one in soliloquy. She wishes she could make him “forget his ugliness,” hinting that transformative love springs from a forgetting of the evil in us and in others, but also from a remembering of the goodness in both.
