La Belle et la Bête (1946)

“Chil­dren believe what we tell them. They have com­plete faith in us.” These fate­ful words, writ­ten in chalk dur­ing the open­ing sequence of Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête, pref­ace the kind of pow­er­ful fairy tale rhetoric found in many a fable. We the audi­ence must sus­pend our dis­be­lief and see the fol­low­ing sto­ry through eyes of an inno­cent. The irony in this request is that Cocteau ends up using the mag­ic found in such tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tives to indict the greedy con­tempt of grown chil­dren eager to sac­ri­fice fam­i­ly in order to ful­fil their basest desires.

Poten­tial for bru­tal­i­ty and vio­lence is imme­di­ate­ly clear in La Belle et la Bête, a sly and dark spin on the clas­sic sto­ry of a cursed Beast (Jean Mar­sais) who becomes even more tor­ment­ed after forc­ing a love­ly damsel to hold up in his fan­tas­ti­cal abode. Dur­ing one ear­ly moment involv­ing some mis­guid­ed archery prac­tice, an errant arrow flies through one open win­dow almost skew­er­ing a lap dog. The threat of death is always but a few inch­es away. What fol­lows is an explo­sion of bick­er­ing, accus­ing, and back­stab­bing that has become a famil­iar trait for Belle’s (Josette Day) dys­func­tion­al family.

While her abra­sive sis­ters pre­pare for a posh par­ty across town, her dead­beat broth­er and his brute of a friend Avenant (also played by Mar­sais) lounge around the house caus­ing trou­ble. Even worse, her impo­tent and flail­ing busi­ness­man of a father (Mar­cel André) is slow­ly being suf­fo­cat­ed by his family’s self-destruc­tive ways, qui­et­ly wait­ing to see who will ruin him first, the chil­dren or the debt col­lec­tors. It’s this des­per­a­tion that leads the bro­ken patri­arch (and even­tu­al­ly Belle her­self) into the Beast’s clutches.

If the first act of La Belle et la Bête show­cas­es famil­ial inse­cu­ri­ty in all its fero­cious­ness, the sec­ond part, which actu­al­ly involves a mon­ster, is amaz­ing­ly peace­ful, full of sur­re­al­ist cin­e­ma tricks and haunt­ing imagery. As Belle makes her way through the exten­sive hall­ways of the Beast’s house, bil­lows of smoke seem to fol­low her every move. Hands jet out from the walls hold­ing chan­de­liers, their light fad­ing in and out as this gor­geous woman glides through the ornate space.

The Beast watch­es close­ly, vis­it­ing Belle at the stroke of sev­en to ask for her hand in mar­riage. But unlike the 1989 Dis­ney ver­sion, this plot device is sup­posed to por­tray a suf­fer­ing sense of long­ing that will nev­er be quelled. We see this iso­la­tion in a shot of the Beast lap­ping up water from a pond, pass­ing the day as a man who has long embraced his ani­mal­is­tic curse when alone.

Here­in lies Cocteau’s core dichoto­my, the idea that both mon­stros­i­ty and beau­ty can be con­cealed skil­ful­ly from the naïve eye, but will even­tu­al­ly spill out like a cup brim­ming with too much water. It’s what makes La Belle et la Bête such a last­ing les­son for the spoiled chil­dren (both young and old) who think they can live with­out liv­ing well.