BEAUTY AND THE BEAST Movie Review
La Belle et la Bete
In an era in which special-effects companies like Industrial Light & Magic and Digital Domain can convince us of the absolute reality of anything we see on the screen, from a T-Rex to the Titanic, a danger exists that lazy filmmakers who rely solely on this realism of the impossible to astonish us may inadvertently neglect the one element of the fantastic that realism has nothing to do with: a sense of wonder. (The new Godzilla looks real, but the flat concept of the movie he stars in makes him a big green bore.) When Jean Cocteau conceived his thrilling Beauty and the Beast, he was well aware that we would know “how they did it.” The secret here has nothing to do with technique. Rather, it's the imagination of the poet who can conceive of such images, who has the genius to place them on the screen so straightforwardly and with such shimmering elegance that we delight as a child does, looking at the simplest and most perfect of toys, charmed to have it in our possession to curl up with as we prepare to dream. We know that those candelabra-bearing arms and eyeball-rolling faces protruding from the walls of the beast's castle are attached to actors on the other side of the wall; it doesn't diminish the boldness of Cocteau's vision, but enhances it. Would Beauty and the Beast been more “special-effects savvy,” more digitally seamless if Cocteau were making it today? In our time, I suppose, the question has no meaning. Yet a viewing of the enormously popular Disney animated version shows much of the Cocteau film's influence, and surprisingly few big show-stopping fx. It's more than conceivable that they learned something by watching this example of real screen magic, but even Disney artists couldn't figure out how to match the sympathy or frighteningly seductive power of Jean Marais's beast. If Beauty and the Beast isn't the greatest filmed fairy tale in cinema history, then I indeed have riches beyond my wildest dreams to anticipate.
NEXT STOP … Orpheus, Donkey Skin, Pinocchio
1946 90m/B FR Jean Marais, Josette Day, Marcel Andre, Mila Parely, Nane Germon, Michel Auclair; D: Jean Cocteau; W: Jean Cocteau; C: Henri Alekan; M: Georges Auric. VHS, LV, DVD HMV, MLB, CRC