La belle et la bête [Beauty and the Beast] (1946)

(On Cable TV, November 2019) If you approach writer-director Jean Cocteau’s La belle et la bête expecting a rougher version of the Disney film … wow, you’re going to have an interesting time. Here he adapts the poetic realism trend of 1930s French cinema to the classic fairytale and the result feels as if it was captured from dreams—hazy, lyrical, nonsensical and yet with a logic of its own. The basic problems of the beauty and the beast fairytale are still very much present—the Stockholm syndrome, the ending that mocks the “ugliness is superficial” message—but executed in such a way that it’s easy to let the style triumph over substance. Which isn’t to say that La belle et la bête skirts its fantastic roots—the makeup of the beast remains deeply impressive, and the film doesn’t dance around the literalization of the metaphor. It’s often surprising, sometimes ethereal, and more compelling than you’d expect. Still, Cocteau overplays his hand and the film is easily a bit too long even at 96 minutes—there’s only so much setup you can tolerate before demanding some progress, after all. Still, this is one of the strongest 1940s French films (and it wasn’t a slough of a decade for French cinema)—still mesmerizing in its stated intention to deliver a true fairytale on the screen.