Directed by Jean Cocteau with Jean Marais and Josette Day
“let me pronounce four magic words, that veritable Open Sesame, once upon a time…”
For me, the magic of great filmmaking is its ability to elicit our childlike capacity for enchantment, as Cocteau openly asks from us in the film’s introduction, while simultaneously telling the paradoxical tale of our grown-up obsessions with desire and fear. Cocteau based his magical version of Beauty and the Beast on the 18th-century story by Madame Leprince de Beaumont. He modeled the surrealistic realm of the beast – a place of shadow, romance, and dreams – on Gustave Doré’s illustrations and the diurnal world of Beauty’s familial life of servitude on paintings by Vermeer. As I watched the film, on several occasions I was reminded of scenes from other great films that echo Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast: the somnambulist watching Jane sleep in Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1920); the image of James Stewart carrying Kim Novak’s limp body in front of the Golden Gate bridge in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958); the long hotel hallway with billowing red curtains in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000).
In addition to the obvious, the contrast of beauty and ugliness is illustrated in the use of darkness and light, and the duality of our human nature can be read in the juxtaposition of interior and exterior worlds. The opening scene of Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast shows a small dog (a “tamed” beast) sleeping indoors, surrounded by three fussing women, who is then very nearly pierced by an arrow carelessly launched through an open window by a couple of silly boys playing outdoors. Later in the film, after she arrives at his castle the beast carries Beauty’s limp body into the bedroom that he has prepared for her. As they move through the threshold of the room, her dress transforms from that of a peasant to a princess. The bedroom appears to reside in a liminal space between interior and exterior where twisting vines surround the bed and the floor appears to be earth. Beauty exists in both the world of her father and the world of the Beast as a prisoner and no matter which world she inhabits there is something or someone that she longs for in the other. She peers into the magic mirror seeking a glimpse not of herself but of the person that she has left behind who is dying as a result of her absence. In the end, Beauty’s kindness frees the Beast from his prison but it seems that Beauty is forever to be ensnared by desire.