Hard-Earned Enchantment: Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast by Craig Hammill
Jean Cocteau’s 1946 Beauty and the Beast is enchanting.
That’s no news flash even to people who’ve never seen the movie.
But I mean…it’s really enchanting. In a way that a lot of modern cinema, even when it wants to be, is not.
Now I don’t want to write a curmudgeonly piece about how cinema was better in the good ol’ days. . .blah, blah, blah, blah. Because there’s so much wonderful cinema coming out now (2021’s The Worst Person in the World is as strange and enchanting in its way as Beauty and the Beast).
But I do want to write a piece about how these works of cinema that often get talked about and footnoted and mentioned actually should be seen. I can almost guarantee you, you’ll be inspired. Really inspired and surprised and refreshed with how unique and modern these supposedly “musty” classics can be.
All around polyglot French poet Jean Cocteau made Beauty and the Beast right at the very end of World War II and the beginning of the peace in pretty meager conditions. The studio itself had spotty electricity and no heating. The actors reportedly huddled together to keep warm. But you’d never know it.
The movie, which tells the famous fairy tale story of Belle who goes to live with the mysterious “Beast” in his haunted/enchanted mansion to help save her father from death, is well-known to all of us raised on the classic Disney feature. What might surprise you about Cocteau’s 1940’s version is how it acts as much as a prologue for the French New Wave as it does a representative for the literary French elegance and poetry of the cinema of Rene Clair, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Jacques Becker of the old guard.
Right off the bat, the credit sequence shows Cocteau himself with Jean Marais (the star of the movie and Cocteau’s partner at the time) at a modern day chalk board. This humorous opening leads to Cocteau writing the initial credits on the chalkboard himself before we move into the period story.
This opening is pretty unexpected for a period fairy tale but it’s just right in letting us know this movie is going to be inventive all the way through.
And the movie itself is jaw-droppingly stunning with all its inventive use of in-camera practical effects. One effect that charmed me was the “magic mirror” that allows Belle and Beast to see what’s going on in the outside world or in the enchanted castle. You would think that this would be accomplished at least with an optical printer but in several instances, Cocteau actually switches angles and uses either a reflection itself or a two way mirror with interior lighting to create the effect.
The moving statues of the fireplace are actual actors in heavy makeup. And the castle is made to seem more epic and grandiose then it must have been with the very astute use of lots of shadow, darkness, a few big constructed setpieces, and lots of smoky, atmospheric shafts of back light.
The film is run in reverse to make it appear that characters “fly” (when in fact they’re just jumping from a platform to the ground) and on and on.
What Cocteau and company prove is that creative solutions and inventiveness are a kind of cinema unto themselves. And you buy into the fantasy and enchantment of the fairy tale world because the filmmakers have made good on the promise all movie folks need to make to an audience: “We worked really hard on this to give you a great story told in an inventive way”.
Sometimes real magic is created when a group of people work really hard to sell a moment on the set, in the camera, through practical effects.
So if you’ve been missing some real magic in your life, pour yourself a glass of really delicious French wine, get someone you want to snuggle up with, and let yourself be spellbound - one of the greatest feats of cinema - by Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.
Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.