Summary
A loving and majestic telling of the classic tale of of love, magic, and the belief that beauty must come from within.
Review
I have a very small memory of seeing my dad watching this film when I was to young to think a subtitled black and white film was any good. I don’t know how old I was but in my head I was quite young.
It isn’t a scary memory or a memory of sneaking something I shouldn’t see (I didn’t want to see it.)It is a fond memory full of all the fuzzy facts and nostalgia filter that our youths take on. Ignorant of context. Childlike.
That is what the story of Beauty and the Beast has always meant to me, Childlike warmth.
This film made me appreciate a tale I already loved more than I thought I could. I would have guessed that I would die with Walt Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” as my favorite rendition. I was wrong.
Jean Cocteau’s beautiful rendition doesn’t have singing and dancing. It doesn’t have a wise-cracking clock and candlestick. It hasn’t ha a marketing machine glom on to it to make it a very part of our cultural movie lexicon. What it does have is something truly magical and childlike as in a fairy tale, but also adult and dark like… well, a fairy tale.
There are political and classist undertones and the love that develops between Beauty and the Beast is of a more mature nature. It grows from something small and fills or rounds out over the film.
It isn’t like the love we see in cartoons and teen movies where someone 1) has a playful moment 2) has ballroom dance 3) is given an extravagant gift 4) overcomes a crisis together 5) Falls In Love. It isn’t an American view of teenage love.
Instead it is honest about many of the feelings one might have over a tragic turn of events. The love portrayed is multi-layered and deeper. The sort of love that grows between two adults who learn to accept life as it is rather than wish for some fonder version of events which caters to their inner fantasy of what teenagers wish love was like.
The characters in this movie seem regal, wild, and tragic but that is what gives them their magic. Their lives seem drawn out and fated to them, yet when someone seeks to stray from fate, events conspire to convince them to accept that fate and reward them when they cease striving and instead live out their better, inner self.
Oh man, I can’t believe I haven’t talked about the production design, character design and special effects, or the cinematography. This movie is gorgeous in every way.
The special effects are a sort of dreamy, hazy, magical as opposed to a large CG or animated world. They are more the stuff of a dream you are fighting off as you fall asleep.
The cinematography is the same, using slow motion and carefully staged shots to create a world which journeys from the mundane world of '“modern-life” to the inner place of a human being. As Belle journeys to the castle she sees the grounds and the buildings but as she enters the castle she seems to enter more than a building, only to find she is journeying into a nother person’s soul. Only later will she realize that this is the greater journey life has in store for her. Losing herself in another.
The cinematography helps the viewer make this connection using slow motion, wide, sweeping shots but the production design contributes by growing more sparse and personal as Beauty grow closer to he beast, even eventually loving him.
It may not sing, it may nt dance, but Jean Cocteau’s vision of this tae will have you sighing, an feeling, ‘yeah, that’s how it really is,” about a film where statues movie and people can wish themselves across the country.
It is a lucious and magical reflection of love, writ large with a true inner heart of depth, fondness, sacrifice and love.
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