Storyline
La Belle et la bête, the film which marked Jean Cocteau's return to directing after an interval of 15 years, is a work which continues the vein of fantasy which had characterised his scriptwriting during the wartime years. To this extent the film is typical of its period, for the early postwar years in France saw a basic continuity with approaches established during the Vichy period (there was no resurgence of realism in France to compare with the emergence of neorealism in Italy).
But in all other ways the appropriation of a fairy tale to the filmmaker's own personal mythology is a totally individual work.
The film is based on the tale as told by Madame Leprince de Beaumont, but there is little evidence in Cocteau's approach of the childlike innocence which the director demands of his audience in his brief introduction to the film. Visually, the film is one of Cocteau's most sophisticated works. The costumes designed by Christian Bérard and the lighting and framing devised by Henri Alekan are decorative rather than functional and take their inspiration from classic Dutch painting, particularly the work of Vermeer. Despite the presence of René Clément as technical supervisor, the film shows none of the reliance on complexity of scripting and use of heavy irony so characteristic of French cinema in the late 1940s. The legend is handled in a dazzingly eclectic style. The home life of Belle's family is parodied and often broadly farcial in tone, as, for instance, in the use of cackling ducks to comment on the attitudes of her sisters. By contrast, the departure of Belle for the Beast's castle and her entry there are totally stylised, with Cocteau employing slow motion photography to obtain a dreamlike effect. to suspend our disbelief. After all, isn't everything else perfectly normal?Title: Beauty and the Beast
AKA: La Belle et la Bête
Year: 1946
Genre: Fantasy
Runtime: 93 min
Country: France
Language: French
Subtitles: English (.srt) + English (.sub/.idx)[/color]
Director: Jean Cocteau
Cast:
Jean Marais: La Bête/The Beast/The Prince / Avenant
Josette Day: Belle
Mila Parély: Félicie
Nane Germon: Adélaïde
Michel Auclair: Ludovic
Raoul Marco: The Usurer
Marcel André: Belle's Father
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