When this movie starts out, you will find yourself - if you are old enough - feeling that you have somehow been transported back in time to the 1950s and some very serious coffee house (NOT Starbucks) where, on Friday nights, they showed "experimental" films (not movies, of course, but films). The surrealist tricks that had been innovative 30 years before in "The Blood of the Poet" are still there, with the people and objects that suddenly disappear or appear and the surreal movement. There is still the clearly enunciated and theatrical speech. By the 1960s, this could be seen as kitsch.
But there is still, fairly often, a certain imaginative touch that comes off as real poetry. Not as much as in "Beauty and the Beast", certainly, to which this is much inferior. But enough to justify giving it a try.
And then there is the cameo appearance by Yul Brenner, who actually speaks very good French. Brenner was a big star at the time; how Cocteau convinced him to appear in this I will never know.
But there is still, fairly often, a certain imaginative touch that comes off as real poetry. Not as much as in "Beauty and the Beast", certainly, to which this is much inferior. But enough to justify giving it a try.
And then there is the cameo appearance by Yul Brenner, who actually speaks very good French. Brenner was a big star at the time; how Cocteau convinced him to appear in this I will never know.