User Reviews

To a degree of success few films have ever achieved, Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946) balances film's opposite yet equal capacities to record life as it is and to create completely imaginary landscapes via editing and optical effects. Most Cocteau films veer heavily toward the fantastic, the mythic, the poetic, or the surrealistic, but in Beauty he rendered a mise en scene based largely on 18th century Dutch painting, employed an invisible camera and editing style, and relied on conventional storytelling techniques in order to make his retelling of the classic fairy tale as realistic as possible. Nevertheless, Beauty and the Beast is primarily noted as among the most successful adaptations of a fairy tale ever made and one of the greatest fantasy films of any type. And this is true despite Cocteau's enormous handicap of working in a recently war-ravaged country with minimal financial and technical resources.

One influential and provocative interpretative approach to Beauty and the Beast is through Freudian psychology. From this perspective, Beauty's story is a symbolic sexual drama in which a young woman breaks free from a psychologically incestuous relationship with her father (and brother?), overcomes her fear of male sexuality and of her own, and ultimately enters mature womanhood.

Strong evidence to support this interpretation can be found in the framing of the film's opening and closing scenes. In the film's opening scene Belle's suitor, Avenant, shoots a (phallic) arrow that misses its ostensible target and enters a ladies-only bedchamber where it lands across the mirror image of Belle on the floor she is polishing. Uninvited, Avenant invades the bedchamber, retrieves the arrow, and uses it to embrace/restrain Belle. He then proposes marriage, and - when he is denied - forces his attention on Belle with something close to physical assault. From a Freudian perspective, Avenant represents the unleashed libido that Belle is not psychologically or culturally prepared to confront directly.

Avenant, in turn, receives his just comeuppance in the film's final scene when he is slain by an arrow from the bow of Diana, protector of chastity and the presiding goddess in the Beast's garden pavilion. Entry to this pavilion (female sexual nature), is permissible only by using a golden key, dominion over which the Beast has chivalrously granted to Belle. (i.e. the woman says when) Yet with the aid of Belle's evil and duplicitous older sisters, Avenant comes into false possession of the golden key. This alone would negate the legitimacy of his entry to the pavilion, but he decides to enter even more illicitly by smashing the hymen-like glass portal hidden on the building's roof, thus prompting his ironic execution via the same phallic symbol with which his pursuit of Belle had begun.

This framing symmetry of two spatial "violations" in the opening and closing scenes of the film is not accidental. It underlines the difference between the Beast's tempered, courtly masculinity and Avenant's unrestrained ego and desire. The film ends not only with the Beast's transformation into the handsome prince thanks to Belle's loving gaze, but also with the transformation of Avenant into the guise of the beast, a physical manifestation of his unrestrained inner animal. That Avenant, the Beast, and the Prince are played by the same actor suggests their Freudian interplay of id, superego, and ego - which Belle is also working out in feminine terms as she resists and then accepts the journey from her father's house, through the Beast's castle, and on to her married royal destiny.

Many scenes throughout Beauty and the Beast acquire added depth through a Freudian approach. The cutting of the rose in the Beast's garden, for instance, can be seen as a symbolic violation that evokes the Beast and begins the liberation of Belle from bondage to her father and evil-sister Mother substitutes. Edited in jump cuts, the threshold scene when the Beast first carries Belle into her castle bedchamber depicts the repeated transformation of Belle's costume from servant/child to woman/bride, the very journey she must undertake as she leaves her "maidenhood" and her father's house and accepts her passage to adult female sexuality and maturity.

Belle's journey between the Merchant's house and the Beast's castle is facilitated by two decidedly Freudian symbols of masculine sexuality: the horse, Magnificent, and the Beast's hunting gloves, steaming with the blood and scent of his animal/masculine power. Indeed, the magic words that Belle must say to prompt Magnificent's gallop back to the castle indicate the psychological necessity of her journey: "go where I am going! Go, go, go!" The relatively more subtle symbol of the stallion as agent of transportation is later replaced by the glove which not only steams with the Beast's masculine power, but which she dons while reclined on the respective beds of her bed chambers in the Castle and the Merchant's house.

That Belle's journey of maturation must be undertaken, despite her reluctance, is most poignantly underscored in the scenes of Belle's return to the Merchant's house after she has lived for a while in the Beast's castle. In her father's house, she rapidly regresses to the physical and psychological bondage that had characterized her condition at the beginning of the film - only now the audience, if not Belle herself - is painfully aware of the arrested development it represents.

Like so many Greta Garbos, we want her out of the there and back with the Beast where she belongs!

In France ,the fairy tale "La Belle et la Bête " is a classic by Madame Leprince de Beaumont.Try to read it if you haven't because you will realize that although Cocteau adapted the story,he took it to new limits ,he dramatically expanded the scope,and most of all,he wiped out an obsolete grating moral.

Mrs De Beaumont's fairy tale insists on virtue ,her story takes virtue over beauty,wit or anything life can bring.The two bad gals are strictly punished at the end of the story:they become statues at the gate of their sister's palace but -supreme humiliation-,they will keep their mind beneath the stone which covers them ,and thus be able to watch their sister's happiness.

While keeping the two sisters' characters,Cocteau leaves the "moral " angle far behind magic,symbolism,surrealism and psychoanalysis.Jean Marais plays three parts:Avenant,la Belle's suitor ,the Beast (four hours of make-up and terrible sufferings during the shooting:Jean Marais was one of the greatest actors France ever had -proof positive was that the new wave (with the exception of jacques Demy) clique never used him-,and the prince.These three entities that finally make one predates Bruno Bettelheim by thirty years:this is not only because Belle does not want to leave her father that she does not want to marry Avenant:she's afraid of the man,he's the real beast.This triple part is Cocteau's genius.Cocteau dropped out the good fairy who appears in a Belle's dream and then at the end of Leprince de Beaumont's story when she punishes the "vilainesses "and rewards the "good ones" Instead ,we have these sublime lines:

-You resemble someone I knew...

-Does it worry you?

-Yes ....(then a beaming face) No!!!

Two words coexist -like in the literary work-:the mundane bourgeois house of the merchant;the Bête's mansion,where everything is possible,where Cocteau uses special effect to create pure poetry,extraordinary enchantment .The two characters seem to act as if they are in a ballet. The passage between the two is first the mysterious forest.Then the Beast reveals his secrets five magic clues:the rose,the golden key,the glove,the ring and the mirror -some of them were in the story- and a horse "le magnifique" as the two worlds intertwines towards the end:Belle's room in her father 's room,in her room in the palace,Avenant coming to her rescue while the Beast is dying,the two characters soon to become one.

This is the best adaptation of a fairy tale for the screen.By writing the cast and credits on a blackboard,Cocteau winks at childhood -for a child he writes everything's possible -besides,it's because the prince did not believe in the fairies -all that is hidden for our poor rational spirit- that he was sentenced to his bestial life.Bruno Bettelheim thought children intuitively actually understood what lied beneath the fairy tales.They do not cry when the wolf eats the first two little pigs because thy do know that there is only one pig ,at three stages of its development.They won't cry when Avenant will be hit by Goddess Diana's arrow because they do understand in their subconscious that all in all,Avenant and the Beast are the same entity:beautiful prince,horrible

beast or simple young man share the same mystery.

Michel Tournier said that when his writing was at the height of its powers,he could appeal to children as well.Cocteau did the same for the seventh art.

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I preferred the animated Disney version of this story to the 1946 Jean Cocteau film. I'm no Disney fan, and I would personally like to stop them from taking over the world (along with Starbucks), but this is one case where I just thought they instilled this fairy tale with more magic. I missed the character of Gaston in the Cocteau version, and I missed also the delightful assortment of animated objects. And I think this story is particularly conducive to being set to music, and I enjoyed the songs in the Disney version. However, on its own terms, the 1946 release is well done, and considered by many to be the definitive version of the beauty/beast tale. I thought the acting was bland, though Belle is indeed a beauty. And there are moments of pure movie magic: the candelabras that light Belle's way, the fireplace that watches her father eat. And for once slow motion is used in a way that doesn't feel cliché. But the relationship between Belle and the Beast isn't well developed. You don't see Belle falling in love with him over the course of the film, and when she professes her love at the end, it seems to come out of thin air. And was I the only one confused by the transformation at the end? It doesn't get explained well at all. Though it is kind of funny at how blase Belle is when the Beast becomes a hunk and says she'll have to get used to his new face.

The film is interesting in that it acknowledges the Beast's animalistic nature. He hunts wild game, he craves blood, and more than once you wonder whether or not he'd rather eat Belle than court her. There's a violent eroticism underlying this film, that I found surprising for the year it was released.

I know Cocteau asks his audience at the film's beginning to watch the film with the eyes of a child and to give itself over to the enchantment of fairy tales, and I have no problem doing that. But even so, I felt like he was using fairy tale logic to explain away things that could have been explained better.

Grade: B

Jean Cocteau's film version of "Beauty and the Beast" begins in a world that is decidedly hostile to magic. Belle's sisters are materialistic, selfish, and snobbish; her brother gambles in taverns; her merchant father talks only about the loss of his ships; and her brother's friend Avenant pursues her unromantically. Belle, a young woman of extraordinary outer and inner beauty, is the only magical or transcendent thing in this society. And it's obvious that she is out of place.

Thus, when the scene shifts to the Beast's castle, the magical imagery is made even more haunting by its contrast to the "real world." Words cannot do justice to these fantastical visuals--you must experience them for yourself. Although the special effects were simple even in Cocteau's time, he orchestrates them so well and films them in such smoky, silvery tones that the result is truly magical. The transformation sequences are still beautiful and surprising; the Beast's castle still has its unexplainable mysteries (for instance, I'm fascinated by his garden, which is full of sculptures of dogs).

Jean Marais does a wonderful job in his double role: the first time I saw the movie, I wasn't aware until the very end that Avenant and the Beast were played by the same actor. Despite the heavy makeup he wears as the Beast, he uses his eyes and voice to stir up immense pathos. It also adds to the movie's mystery and psychological complexity to have Marais play both of Belle's suitors.

While Josette Day (who plays Belle) never ascends to Marais' heights of emotion, you never doubt her essential goodness and inner strength. She, too, undergoes a transformation, from a girl afraid to leave her father's side, to a young woman ready to accept romantic love. The actors playing Belle's rascally brother and calculating sisters give lively comic performances.

Unfortunately, the ending of "Beauty and the Beast" is rushed and confused, as Cocteau tries, and fails, to follow two plot lines at once. The emotional climax of the fairy tale is the Beast's almost dying, only to be redeemed at the last minute by Belle's love, but this potentially beautiful moment gets lost in the shuffle. Instead, we are left with the disappointing image of the Beast transformed into a rather sugary Prince.

A note at the beginning of the film urges us to watch it with a child's sense of wonder, not an adult's cynicism. And while it's easy to be cynical about the last few minutes of "Beauty and the Beast," the rest of the film is so wondrous that it renders this note unnecessary.