"Beauty And The Beast" (1946)

Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty And The Beast” came out in 1946, just a year after the end of World War II, two years after the French Liberation and fourteen years after his first feature film, “The Blood Of A Poet”. Being a filmmaker was but one of the many talents of this complete artist. Cocteau was a poet, a playwright, a painter, a sculptor, a screenwriter, a novelist, a director of photography, a critic, an actor, a composer, an editor, a costume designer, an illustrator and a ballet creator as well as a film director.

As the title of his first feature film might indicate, Cocteau preferred to think of himself as a poet above all other things, and his adaptation of “Beauty And The Beast” makes it easy to see why. Modern viewers more familiar with the also-masterful Disney version might find themselves disconcerted by its lack of structure and character development. Cocteau is telling a fairytale, in every way. He doesn’t try and make it more sophisticated. It’s a fairytale and it’s told as such. This is made clear before the film even starts, as an opening crawl asks the audience to place themselves in the mindset of children, who accept the content of fairytales unquestioningly and unconditionally, their minds unshackled by logic or judgment.

Thus, like in fairytales, most characters are fairly archetypal without descending into caricature (Baz Luhrmann, I’m looking at you). Belle (Josette Day) is kind, honest, loving and compassionate. Her sisters, like Cinderella’s, are petty, selfish, arrogant and shallow even when reduced to poverty. Her brother Ludovic (Michel Auclair) is a well-meaning self-described scoundrel. This leaves the film’s two most complex characters and, not coincidentally, they are both played by Cocteau’s lover and muse Jean Marais: The Beast and Avenant.

 

Avenant is a character that did not appear in Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s original fairytale. He appears as Ludovic’s best friend and, most importantly, Belle’s suitor. A proud, handsome blond Adonis, Avenant attempts to woo Belle only to be politely turned down. She tells him she does not love him and is in any case too devoted to her father to marry. Avenant responds by forcibly trying to kiss her, stopped by Ludovic’s interference. They fight but still they remain friends. As the family’s merchant father is ruined by the loss of his fortune, Avenant convinces Ludovic to sign a contract with a moneylender enabling him to repossess their home and furniture to pay off his debts. This reduces the family to poverty.

Modern audiences will quickly recognize Avenant as the precursor to the Disney film’s Gaston. Like Gaston, he represents the Beast’s opposite number: Whereas the Beast is ugly, considerate and unselfish, Avenant is handsome, rude and brutish.

Yet he is not the monster Gaston turns out to be. When Belle returns for a week to take care of her ailing father and reveals the secret trinkets the Beast has entrusted her with, Avenant, Ludovic and the sisters concoct a plan to steal them, find the Beast’s castle and kill him. Whereas the sisters are motivated by spite, jealousy and envy, Avenant’s motives are nobler: he believes the Beast is keeping Belle under an evil spell and that he can use his treasure to pay off her father’s debts.

It makes sense from his point of view. If a woman you loved came back after spending a long time as the captive of a beast who had threatened to kill her father for picking his rose, claimed that he treated her well and was wearing magic jewelry, wouldn’t you assume her to be either under an evil spell or suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

Avenant, while not an especially nice man, is not evil. But his love for Belle has driven him to attempt murder and burglary – the former crime being futile, since the Beast was dying of a broken heart until Belle’s loving tears resurrected him. Just at that moment, Avenant is punished by an arrow throw by the animated statue of Diane and turned into a Beast just as the Beast is resurrected with Avenant’s handsome traits. It is then that Belle finally admits that she did love him.

This is summed up by the ex-Beast, who observes that love can turn a man into a beast just as easily as it can turn a beast into a man. Specifically, the love that Avenant felt for Belle that she never openly returned to him turned him into a Beast, whereas the love that the Beast felt for Belle and that she reciprocated in his dying moments turned him back into a man. An interesting distinction that raises a few questions: Could Belle be held partially responsible for Avenant’s fate due to her refusal to admit her feelings for him, out of love for her father? If so, this would give an additional twist on the meaning of “love can turn a man into a Beast”. Not only did Avenant’s unrequited love for Belle turn him into a Beast, but so did Belle’s love for her father.

I am not highly versed in psychology, but this Oedipus-like quadrangle is well-suited to Cocteau’s oneiric style. Cocteau’s first film, “The Blood Of A Poet”, was a surrealist work of art about a young artists’ sexual insecurities. Sexual insecurity is arguably even more present in “Beauty And The Beast”, in the shape of the Beast.

Viewers like me who grew up with the Disney film will remember that film’s Beast being its protagonist in the classical sense as he is the one who undergoes a journey of transformation: Turned into a Beast as punishment for his arrogance and selfishness, he grows from self-loathing volatile brute to gentleman after Belle teaches him to control his temper.

In this film, the Beast’s demeanor is much more collected. He does not raise his voice often and generally behaves like a gracious, polite host. The beastly nature of his character is not so much temperamental as it is sexual. This is represented in several different ways:

 

-          His vehement rejection when she looks at him in the eyes after he carries her unconscious body into her bedroom and she wakes up. Was he tempted to rape her? Did her awakening and look in his eyes snap him out of it?

 

-          The ambiguous look on Belle’s face during their first nightly meeting, when he appears behind her. Is that fear, arousal, or a bit of both? Also, look how she handles that knife.

 

-          The scene in which she observes him from a hiding place as he paces the corridors, gazing at his smoking hands. Whenever he has killed or appears to feel a strong emotion, the Beast’s hands or back smoke as if they were on fire.

 

-          A few minutes later, he goes into her bedroom and voyeuristically uses the magic mirror to see where she is hiding. She then goes into her bedroom and orders him to get out, he reacts with embarrassment and shame, like a boy caught masturbating by his mother.

 
He can only appear to her later in the night, supposedly because his beastly impulses are more controlled than during the day. In one scene, an early stroll in the late afternoon is briefly interrupted when the Beast senses a doe nearby and is almost overcome with the urge to hunt it.

The Beast is mysterious and fascinating because of what he represents. We never find out exactly why or how he was cursed, or even if he was cursed in the first place. For all we know, he could have been born that way. He is an embodiment of Man’s innate compulsions, resisting sexual temptation and violent urges.

None of this, of course, is explicitly defined as such. The film’s surface is that of a fairytale, and its sexual undercurrents can easily slip through the minds of children. But it is there, in the subconscious. And what better way to express the subconscious than through dreams? This is where the extraordinary sets and special effects come into play: The Beast’s castle serves as a refuge for repressed desires and feelings. Visitors are constantly surrounded by protruding arms, silently guiding them through dark corridors and luxurious meals, protruding out of walls and tables. The statues silently observe them, like voyeurs, watching their every move.

The darkness created by scarce lighting accentuates a mixture of uneasiness and fascination, particularly in the dining room and hall corridor. The backgrounds seem barely existent, the furniture and candle-bearing arms coming out of seeming nothingness. It mixes both intimacy and claustrophobia; you feel both alone and surrounded, attracted and repulsed, much as Belle feels towards the Beast.

 

A “Beauty And The Beast” review would be incomplete without mentioning Jean Marais’s performance as the triple role of Avenant, the Beast and the ex-Beast. It is a complicated and fascinating one. As Avenant, Marais is as masculine and brash as one would expect a swashbuckling hero to be, arrogant but not entirely devoid of charm. The charm is merely buried by the arrogance. As the Beast, that charm is present in his high raspy voice, creepy yet oddly seductive. His eyes do the rest of the work, enhanced rather than burdened by an astonishing makeup that reportedly took 5 hours a day and makes him look like a cross between a lion and a bear. So compelling is he that, when turned into a human, he becomes comparatively bland and uninteresting even compared to Avenant. Reportedly, the final transformation prompted Greta Garbo (or Marlene Dietrich according to Roger Ebert) to shout out "Give me back my Beast!" during the American premiere of the film.

Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty And The Beast” is a beautiful work of art not only because of its timeless visual magnificence but because it visually conveys the source material’s subconscious meaning with subtlety, attention and intelligence without straying from the story.

"The Seventh Continent"

The film opens with close-ups detailing a number plate, a wheel and headlight being washed by a hose, the sound of the running water sounding strangely like a sea storm. Then we get a frontal shot of the windshield, covered in water. Then finally, we cut to the inside of the car. The camera is in the backseat, standing perfectly still. The opening credits roll as the car drifts slowly through the great washing machine, in a long shot that lasts approximately 2 minutes and 55 seconds.

Rarely has an opening sequence more adequately set its film’s theme and tone. This will be a slow, inexorable, unforgiving journey through everyday life in all its banality, from the start of the machine down to its inevitable end.

The sound is omnipresent, overwhelming, as if to compensate for the camera’s lack of movement. Indeed, the camera rarely moves at all during the film. The memories I have are of still shots, mostly middle ones, rarely wide, generally showing only a fraction of the space and characters. Indeed, in the images following the opening credits, we don’t see the characters’ faces until the eighth minute. The family is introduced to us through the actions of their morning routine, but not through the way they feel about them. And for good reason: There really is nothing much to be felt at all. The morning routine is familiar to most viewers, but Haneke’s strict focus on the actions and movement drains the comfort out of that familiarity, exposing it as nothing more than a series of gestures and movements accompanied by a few meaningless words.

 
I mentioned the importance of the sound. It’s particularly present in those scenes. The everyday sounds of footsteps, milk being poured into a bowl of cereal, kitchen utensils being put down on the table and bed covers making contact with their owners’ bodies, are recorded and mixed in a way that makes each one distinct and gives the viewer an impression of extra realism, even though we don’t really hear these sounds as clearly and separately in real life. Since the shots are quite long and do not have a lot of things happening in them, the viewer is forced to focus on content, on what they see AND hear and the effect it has on them.

One particular sound that dominates all others – without obscuring them – during these scenes is that of the radio. For some reason, the version I saw did not subtitle the words being broadcast, but the recurring mentions of Israel, the Soviet Union, the Vatican and Yitzhak Rabin make the nature of the program clear: International news bulletin. The story is divided into three parts, each taking place in a separate year between 1987 and 1989. Each part – and thus each year – begins with a news bulletin dominating the soundtrack of the first few images.

This narrative device gives “The Seventh Continent” adds a new layer to this Austrian middle-class family’s deterioration: As the collapse of the Berlin Wall – and thus of the Eastern Bloc and of the communist ideal – grows more and more imminent, so does the family’s implosion. As Austria was part of the Western bloc and the family is very clearly bourgeois, this should not be taken as a political statement so much as a contribution to maintaining an atmosphere of impending doom.

When we do get to see the family members’ faces, they only serve to baffle us further in our attempts to figure them out. We can never truly understand exactly what is going on in their minds. Consider the letters sent to grandparents, read in voice-over by the family’s mother, Anna, telling them (and us) that the father, Georg, is making good progress in his job in spite of a boss she tells us is incompetent. This is read over still, distant shots of Georg going to work and entering his office. Nothing we are told in the letter is ever truly confirmed or denied by what we see. It doesn’t need to be because it is irrelevant. Yes, Georg has a job in which he seems to occupy a fairly respectable position. But so what? It does not appear to bring him any happiness or even any unhappiness for that matter. Indeed, in most of these shots, he is barely visible. He looks like he's in a Stanley Kubrick film, rendered tiny and insignificant by his job.

There is also a brother, whom Anna’s letter informs us is recovering from depression, though that does not stop him from slowly breaking down in tears during a family dinner. He is the only member of the family who will not be involved in the final, terrible act of self-destruction.

 

But most cryptic of all is the family’s young daughter, Evi. She causes a commotion in her school’s toilets when she appears to panic. Her teacher repeatedly questions her, but she stubbornly refuses to tell her what’s wrong. After some coaxing, Evi claims to have gone blind. The teacher tests her by waving her hand in front of her and asking her if she can see “it”. Evi says no. Her teacher asks her what she can’t see. Evi replies “Well, your…” and glances at the hand, betraying herself.

 
Several scenes later at home, Evi is again subjected to questioning, this time from her mother who demands to know if she really did pretend to be blind. Again Evi stays silent at first, looking at her mother blankly. Her mother, seen in close-up from Evi’s subjective point of view, looks her in the eye, calmly telling her that she will not hurt her and just wants to know if the story is true. Still blank-faced, Evi caves in, not out of pressure, it seems, so much as out of boredom. Anna stays silent for a second or so before breaking her promise and slapping Evi in the face, as the scene immediately cuts.

Evi’s behavior, much as the rest of the family’s, will never properly be explained. Was it merely an attempt to draw attention? Or maybe to get a brief respite from the soul-crushing mundaneness of the world in which she is trapped. A world of artificiality and coldness from which the only hope of escape lies in an idealized dream of a made-up Australia, the titular seventh continent, represented by the image of a beach with plastic rocks and a matte background painting of a stormy sea, with accompanying sounds of waves. Even their dreams are fake.

“The Seventh Continent” was Michael Haneke’s directorial debut and set up most of his recurring themes: Emotional alienation, the perceived falseness of the bourgeois way of life, the damage television and film do to the “video generation”, and the implosion of the family unit. His films have a reputation for being bleak and even depressing. The bleakness of this film is inarguable, yet even in darkness, it reaches beauty that make the term “depressing” inapplicable to it. I think of a scene towards the end, as the family has all but completed the systematic destruction of their house and have all swallowed poison. Waiting for the end, they sit on a sofa and watch their television play a clip of Jennifer Rush performing the classic 80’s pop love song “The Power Of Love” (I think there must be at least 3 of these). Haneke has previously shown television clips playing during dramatic scenes to highlight the programs’ shallowness and the falseness of the universe they depict. Here, however, the contrast between the grim reality of the family’s slow death and the upbeat song makes for a poignant image: That of people whose life is literally crumbling around them, using their last moments to try and cling to some last fabric of happiness, even if it is manufactured.

 Haneke’s stylistic sobriety recalls Robert Bresson’s later films – particularly “L’Argent” (1983), his last, grimmest and greatest film. He observes the family’s inexorable march towards death with detachment but not without compassion. He is like a visitor from another time and another place, watching from a glass, unable to help these people but able to record them so that others may avoid repeating their mistakes.