written and directed by Jean Cocteau
based on the story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont

Criterion Collection #6.

The writing of this entry has been oddly fraught. I have begun and abandoned two versions already. I know, I know: who cares. Indeed.

The first miscarriage was the result of writing immediately after my first viewing, before I had gone back for the commentaries. Reactions change after you watch something several times. The second miscarriage was a bizarre experiment in writing by dictation + transcription. My spoken train of thought was fairly compelling, I thought, but only when it hit the page did it become clear to me how ridiculously unbounded it was, and how impervious to distillation. When I write, I struggle against not just my graceless verbosity, but also my tendency to think by disjunct leaps. The challenge of articulating my thoughts on a given subject but not on others feels something like peg-solitaire. It’s hard not to strand those pegs!

So let’s get right to it, as condensed as possible. I enjoyed this movie but held reservations. Those reservations were at the fore in my initial response; by the time I had watched the movie thrice more, for the commentaries and the opera (see below), I had become accustomed to those reservations and so was better able to enjoy the movie for what it is, rather than dwell on what it isn’t.

First, my reservations, enumerated:

1. The best moments outclass the average by an unflattering margin. The eerie, atmospheric fantasy sequences are wonderful, which only points up how the other scenes can be rather precious and are frequently dull.

2. Cocteau has many moments of fine inspiration, but he is not a natural filmmaker; his relationship to the medium is abstract rather than intuitive, and as a result there are many moments where rhythm and emphasis are subtly mishandled. A lot of goodwill and momentum ends up falling through those cracks.

3. Also symptomatic of Cocteau’s abstracted approach to the art is his naïve affection for blatant stagecraft and raw film tricks (hidden cuts and dissolves, mirrors, slow and reversed motion, etc.) I find these techniques delightful, but it must be acknowledged that they distance the audience from the story, because they expose and embrace artifice. And with this in mind, Cocteau’s prefatory injunction to the audience that we try to approach the tale like a child who “really believes” seems disingenuous – and/or condescending, to children, audiences, and fairy tales.

4. From Cocteau’s onscreen presence and affected handwriting (and the star under his signature), to his dreamy boyfriend in the role of godlike magician, sensitive lover, shirtless rogue, and flamboyantly caped lion, to the film’s undisguised and utter disinterest in Beauty, the ostensible lead character: there is an unpleasant Siegfried-and-Roy air of unchecked homosexual ego underpinning the whole thing. Yeah, I said it.

There’s no room for self-regard in the telling of fairy tales. “Fairy tales and the very sensitive artists who love them” is another story. This story, I believe.

Those are the gripes – or enough of them for here, anyway.

The praise is:

1. The scenes of the unearthly and fantastic are lovely, strong, and memorable. There are several images in this movie of high enough quality to justify all the rest. The strange Doré/Méliès/Dalí ambiance of the Beast’s castle is as distinctive and evocative a psychological space as any in a movie.

2. The photography is beautiful, bolstered by the lighting and costumes.

3. The trick shots and magic are all, as I said, delightful, both quaint and uncanny. I especially liked the moment when Beauty teleports back home and emerges through a hole in space.

4. Once you have accepted that the movie will never be quite as Edgar Allan Poe, quite as fevered as you would like, it begins to feel rather cozy. I imagine that to those who grew up with this movie (are there such people?), it could seem like a very warm and inviting place to return.

Music by Georges Auric lays it on a little thick at times but has some fine episodes, especially in the scenes where Beauty is exploring the castle in silence and the score carries us. Auric’s allusions to Ravel were perfectly tasteful but nonetheless inspired me to speculate about the superior score Ravel himself would have written, since this movie would have been exactly his sort of thing. (He did in fact write a little piece about la belle et la bête).

Here’s the Main Title, track 6 for your album. Auric has gone pretty blandly Hollywood here and it’s not the best piece in the score. I was tempted to select an excerpt from elsewhere, but I’d like to try to stick to standalone music – overtures, exit music, intermissions, etc. – and there were no cues that could be played completely without sound effects anyway.

There is a very attractive rerecording of the complete score that makes a much better case for Auric than the original. But for you I’m sticking with the straight-from-the-film version; the crackly mix and blunt performance is part of the movie’s personality.

Incidentally, of the five previous movies: La grande illusion has no soundtrack available (well, someone is selling a CD of the audio ripped straight from the film, but that doesn’t count); Shichinin no samurai was recently released but is already hard to come by; The original recording of The Lady Vanishes has, unsurprisingly, never been released, but oddly enough, someone recently concocted a full arrangement of the tune in piano concerto style, so that this album could claim to feature music from the movie, and you can still get that track on various Hitchcock compilations; Amarcord has been released and is fairly beloved; a few cues at least from Les quatre cents coup have been released, but don’t seem to be available now. As for La Belle et la Bête, the rerecording is your only choice, and you wouldn’t want the original anyway.

This all brings me to the last thing I must address. For the occasion I am resurrecting some text from the original cranky draft of this entry:

On this DVD is something bizarre: an alternate audio track containing an opera that Philip Glass composed in 1994 to be performed in sync with the film. What he has created is, in theory, fascinating: a full-length film opera paced like a non-opera. The project of composing a continuous work to supplant the entire original audio of an existing film is itself intriguing. This stuff is truly right up my alley. But Philip Glass, I finally feel emboldened to say, is terrible, and this opera is horrendous. I am tempted to put “opera” in quotes. It felt more like opera day on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. For each scene, an accompaniment is laid down, built on – get this, Glass fans – a regular pulse, and then every single line of dialogue is plopped down on it wherever it happens to fall, to sync up with the mouths. He makes a token effort, at best, to relate the sung melodies to the looping harmonies, and the “click” tempi in which this business is worked out seem to have been chosen with no great sensitivity to the content of the scenes. The vocal lines end up being 100% melodically and rhythmically asinine, just outbursts of comically rushed-sounding garbage that seem as if they were auto-set by a poorly-programmed computer. His approach reduces the movie to scene-long blocks of unified affect, a technique that might play as atmospheric power in Mr. Glass’s other projects, but here just feels like obstinacy and laziness. Composing 90 minutes of opera/film score is a pretty hefty task – but not if you mostly ignore the film, reduce the text-setting to a purely mechanical process, and just play inane vamps to cover the time. Then it’s pretty easy, isn’t it. And – and this is really the most infuriating thing about it – even if we accept that Mr. Glass’s personal brand requires and excuses all of the above, even if we sigh and try to embrace the idea that 90 minutes of inane vamping is a sophisticated artistic response to this film – even then – we are still left with the fact that these are for the most part ugly, awkward vamps, badly orchestrated for chintzy synthesizers. They do not “feel” like the movie or the story or fantasy or mystery or anything good. They feel like peepee.

Ugh. Nonetheless an interesting project, and the disgust that I felt while watching it was accordingly interesting disgust, for me. So thanks, Philip.

But seriously: this guy is artistic fraud par excellence. Just because music has aesthetic value doesn’t mean the value necessarily originates in the talent or intellect of a composer. A single sustained chord has aesthetic value, and so does a room with a good paint job. Philip Glass is like the guy at the paint store; his paint is reliable enough, and is useful for certain rooms. But it’s as if Sherwin Williams let his fame go to his head and started producing vast sample chips for display at MOMA. “This sample chip, a gray-green entitled ‘November Mist,’ is a meditation on the inner life of genius, and is designed to replace the visual in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête.” Seriously, that’s what this was like.

Finally, the commentaries: were the best yet. There are two – Arthur Knight and Sir Christopher Frayling – and they go in rather different directions and complement each other nicely. Both are intelligent and relaxed.

I had planned to talk about the original story of Beauty and the Beast itself, about the odd changes that were made by Cocteau, and about the debt owed by the Disney version to this film and the ways that Disney’s version actually improves on the plotting. But now I just want this to be over.

And lo!