Classic Cinema Obsession: Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête

By Jennifer Baldwin.

“Not only can fairy-tales be enjoyed because they are moral, but morality can be enjoyed because it puts us in fairyland, in a world at once of wonder and of war.”
G.K. Chesterton, Fairy Tales

“It was in fairy stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

“You stole a rose, so you must die.”
Jean Marais as The Beast in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête

ONCE UPON A TIME…

A frightened merchant is lost in the woods. He is trying to get back to his home and his children, but instead he stumbles into an enchanted part of the forest.

Branches part; a castle stands in the clearing. Tired and cold, the merchant enters the castle.

The castle itself is enchanted. It is a living castle, where arms come out of the walls to hold candlesticks and statues see with living eyes.

It is a castle where doors and mirrors talk and a rose holds the power of life and death.

It is the castle of a Beast. A beast with a curse.

And only by a look of true love will he find release from his curse. That look will come from a Beauty, a young woman who sacrifices her freedom to save her merchant father, who comes to be a prisoner in the Beast’s castle, and who will eventually come to love him.

This is Jean Cocteau’s haunting, beautiful fairy tale vision, La Belle et la bête.

As Chesterton wrote, “fairy tales go to the root of all law”; they are at their very heart, moral tales. In fairyland, there are rules that must be obeyed, laws that must be observed, and the tales themselves often deal with those mortals who break the laws, who steal the apples or the rose and the consequences that follow.

In the end, the heroine must put things right. By finally doing the right thing, she restores the world to joy. In fairy tales, there are grave punishments for breaking the rules, but there are also immense wonders for putting things right. In this way, fairy tales give morality a kind of magic.

It is at our own peril, then, that we abandon the morality of traditional fairy tales and replace them with the “edgy” irony and hip post-modernism of the “fractured fairy tale,” which seems, at the moment, to be the only kind of fairy tale Hollywood can tell. Personally, I put the blame on Shrek 2. (I can’t bear to blame the first Shrek because I thought that film was quite wonderful. But the poor quality and eventual success of the Shrek sequels has given rise to a million copycats, each one more cynical than the next. A bad trend.)

Another essential function of the fantasy story is to help us see/re-see the beauty of the ordinary world. Tolkien calls this quality of fantasy, “Recovery.” The giant golden trees of Lothlorien somehow give the ordinary trees of our world a heightened beauty, a loftier pedigree. This is the exact opposite of a film like Avatar, which caused many viewers to become depressed upon reentering the ordinary world. People were dismayed that our own world had so little to offer in comparison with Pandora. The opposite of “recovery,” one might even say the visions of Pandora created by Cameron in Avatar were dismissive and destructive towards our own world, giving the audience a false sense of wonder that risked ruining their appreciation for what is real.

As Tolkien wrote in his classic essay, On Fairy Stories: “By the forging of Gram, cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus, horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon, root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.” This is the essence of Tolkien’s theory of “Recovery.” The fairy story, by endowing the natural world with supernatural qualities, helps us “see” our own world with a heightened sense of awe and wonder.

Recovery is another important function of the fairy story that many modern-day fantasy films have disregarded. Again, it’s hard to imbue a sense of wonder or beauty in the natural world when everything in a given story is approached with hip, ironic distance.

Hollywood can’t seem to do fairy tales without irony anymore. I went to see Toy Story 3 over the weekend and had to endure a painfully bad trailer for the latest Disney 2D animated movie, Tangled, another tired, irony laden fairy tale adaptation. This time the fairy tale being massacred is “Rapunzel.” Gone is the dark forest where Rapunzel gets imprisoned in the tower. Gone is her fear of the witch who has captured her. Gone is the tone of something ancient and magical in the tale, replaced by corny romantic comedy conventions and hipster dialogue.

Jean Cocteau’s fairy tale classic is different. It is a rigorously faithful adaptation of the “Beauty and the Beast” tale, so much so that it doesn’t even feel like a “normal” movie. It’s so faithful to the original story that it’s hard to call it an “adaptation” at all – it’s simply a filmed fairy tale. It avoids the usual modern tendency in cinema of giving characters cumbersome, hackneyed “psychologies” in order to make them more “realistic.” The characters in this film remain archetypal, never given over to cheap moments of pop psychology. The story is all simplicity, never straying from the tale that is to be told, never verging off into some cliché subplot meant to adhere to a Hollywood screenwriting formula. And while the special effects are still dazzling and beautiful, they remain grounded in a realness that is a far cry from the garish, chaotic images of the modern CGI spectacle.

And, of course, Cocteau makes sure to include the morality of fairyland in his film. There are rules and laws, from the Beast’s rose that must not be plucked:

To the rule forbidding anyone from entering Diana’s Pavilion:

To the kind, loving look from Belle that will break the Beast’s curse:

There is a strange kind of order to this world. It’s exemplified by the magic of Magnificent, the horse, who will take you wherever you wish to go if only you say the magic words: “Go where I am going, Magnificent. Go, go, go.”

And there is recovery here as well: Magnificent, the horse; the Beast’s magic glove; the magic mirror; the rose; the living statues; the arms holding candlesticks; the golden light of the Beast’s riches; the smoke that rises from the Beast’s violent hands; the dead deer in the garden; the magic forest itself and the enchanted stone of the castle; Belle’s tears that turn to diamonds.

All of these and more – ordinary objects, for the most part, imbued with the wonders of magic, making the ordinary objects of our own world somehow more magical. A statue in real life doesn’t have eyes that see or the ability to move, but don’t the best statues seem as if they could come to life at any moment? Smoke doesn’t rise from our hands whenever we do a wrong deed, but don’t we feel the burning of guilt under our skin just the same?

All this Cocteau does just by adhering to the story and spirit of the fairy tale. Even sixty-four years later, La Belle et la bête retains its power to make us gasp in awe and let us get lost in fairyland. The Beast – neither animated nor created from CGI – is still as real to us today as he was to audiences in 1946.

In the last twenty years or so (and perhaps even longer), this style of fairy tale storytelling in film has been abandoned by Hollywood. The Harry Potter franchise and the Lord of the Rings films are exceptions, perhaps, but then they are not strictly “fairy tales” but fantasy films that borrow some of the magical elements of fairy tales and myths. What passes for “fairy tale films” these days is the modernized fairy tale, the post-modern/deconstructionist fairy tale, the snarky fairy tale, the fractured fairy tale. Is it possible for us to regain the true spirit of fairy tales in film? Can we ever make something so simple and so profound as La Belle et la bête again?

I think it’s possible. I still believe in the laws of fairyland. We’ve been breaking those laws lately with our modernized fairy tale movies, but there’s still time to put things right. There’s still time for Recovery and the regaining of the fairy tale world that has been lost.

Posted on July 31st, 2010 at 9:37am.