Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête is at once deeply fantastical in its fairy tale set design and ethereal cinematography and strikingly real in its class observations and human behavior. It is a film that bears its director's signature quite literally, opening with his deftly scribbling the actors' names in chalk as a helper quickly erases the board so Cocteau can keep writing and subsequently using a hand-written scroll with his John Hancock to set the movie in motion. Cocteau even kicks off the film with the clack of a soundboard, the self-reflexive touches the cinematic equivalent to tucking a child into bed before opening up the storybook.Like a storybook, Beauty and the Beast uses few words, all the better to imprint on a young mind. Instead, Cocteau, cinematographer Henri Alekan and designer Christian Berard craft a world of clashing reality and ephemera, capturing banal bourgeois village life and frighteningly dense woods before moving into the full-on fantasy of the Beast's castle. The aesthetic, which draws from the engravings of Gustave Doré, is at once static and vibrant, using various camera tricks to bring out the magic of its bizarre sights. This is a poetic film, to the point that the various mentions of children's story I've made may be wholly inapt; though I've seen some of Cocteau's poems and artwork, this is the first of his films I've viewed, yet I understand immediately his quest to find the "classical avant-garde." No one would use a fairy tale in such daring fashion until Catherine Breillat put out Bluebeard more than 60 years later.
