Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on June 26, 2002 at 07:23:34

Hope I get to see this on the big screen before it leaves town.

clark

Fairy-tale feast

Beauty and the Beast is all beauty

BY STEVE VINEBERG
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La Belle et la Bête/Beauty and the Beast
Written and directed by Jean Cocteau. With Jean Marais, Josette Day, Marcel André, Mila Parély, Nan Germon, and Michel Auclair. In French with English subtitles. All week at the Brattle, June 21 through 27.

HIS SOUL IS IN HIS EYES - and Beauty must learn to see it.

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The newly restored print of Jean Cocteau’s 1946 Beauty and the Beast illumines one of the most gorgeous black-and-white films ever made. It’s also one of the great fairy-tale movies. Josette Day, with her porcelain complexion, plays the pure-hearted maiden who offers herself to the Beast (played by Cocteau’s lover, the implausibly handsome Jean Marais) in barter for the life of her luckless father (Marcel André) after the Beast catches him stealing a rose from his garden. (All three of these actors also appear in Les parents terribles, which Cocteau directed in 1949 — the same year he released his Orpheus, with Marais in the title role. This is a trio of masterpieces.)

In Cocteau’s version of the story, Beauty travels from the faded mannerist grandeur of her merchant father’s house — where her selfish, vindictive sisters (Mila Parély and Nan Germon) have to shoo the chickens out of their palanquins and rouse their drunken footmen before they can pay a call on some titled local — to the Beast’s High Gothic castle, where the statues have live faces and disembodied hands sprout from the table to pour flagons of wine for his guests. The Beast explains to Beauty, who begins as his prisoner and becomes his adored friend, that when it’s night on his estate, it’s daytime at her family home, and Cocteau contrasts the two worlds of the movie in every significant way. Beauty, at the bidding of the Beast, takes on the role of mistress of his castle, dressed in regal gowns and jewels, while at home she’s treated as a servant. The absurd aristocratic pretensions of her sisters (whose feathery hats are like punch lines to some implied joke at their expense) are juxtaposed with the genuine magnificence of the Beast’s lands, the father’s poverty with the Beast’s infinite enchanted riches, the barnyard animals with the deer that race through his forests (and that he hunts for food, emerging from the carnage with smoking paws). The sisters’ fake, onion-drawn tears, which they present to Beauty to manipulate her, are contrasted with the Beast’s broken heart when he believes she has deserted him. The pearl necklace, a gift from the Beast, shrivels when she offers it out of kindness to one of her sisters, who have shriveled souls. Even the Beast himself has a counterpoint: Avenant (also played by Marais), Beauty’s suitor and the friend of her brother (Michel Auclair), whose love for her is marred by his ignoble actions.

The legendary Henri Alekan photographed; Christian Bérard designed the production (with Lucien Carré), the costumes (with Antonio Castillo and Marcel Escoffier), and the Beast’s make-up. In a collar like a ruff, with a magnificent cat’s face like Bert Lahr’s as the Cowardly Lion, Marais looks astonishing, and he speaks in a hoarse purr. From the back he suggests a vampire, with stiff, arched, cloaked shoulders, and his walk is a stealthy, precise stalk, yet he’s part human — he treats Beauty with courtly graciousness, and he feels shame and remorse for the carnivorous nature he can’t help. Like Beauty, he loves roses more than anything in the world; this is a link between them. She’s his ideal. He tells her not to look in his eyes, and though he doesn’t say why, you sense it’s because she might see his longing for her, his aching loneliness and desire, his vulnerability. The movie is full of mirrors, most important the magic, all-seeing one he gives her, and his eyes, too, are a mirror. Beauty says that some men’s ugliness is inside them, but his is on the exterior; the soul he protests he possesses is reflected in those eyes, and until she can perceive it, she will continue to refuse the proposal of marriage he makes her every night.

The movie is full of wondrous images, like the Beast’s drinking water out of Beauty’s hands, and the way his ears literally perk up when he hears the delicate footfall of a deer in the distance, and the first image of the enchanted horse, the Magnificent, with its tinseled mane. Take a child to see this film and he or she will remember it forever.

Issue Date: June 20 - 27, 2002