'Beauty and the Beast' is viewed as a classic text about the awakening of female sexuality in a young virginal woman. There have been many musical, film and stage adaptations, and literary re-workings (Angela Carter’s story “The Tiger’s Bride (1979) is an interesting feminist re-writing of the tale). For many Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete (1946) is the definitive film adaptation.
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Its certainly one of cinema’s great fantasy films with unforgettable poetic detail such as live human hands, arranged on corridor walls, holding lit candelabra: quivering in anticipation of the guests as Georges Auric’s music enchants.
Jack Zipes, the renowned scholar of fairy tales, published a book in in 2011 called The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films. The first film version of Beauty and the Beast was in 1899 and clocking in at number twenty was 1978’s Beauty and the Beast made by the Slovak director Juraj Herz.
Herz retains the Cocteau props and an atmospheric Gothic castle. However the beast is no longer a bear but a strange looking bird-man (It made me think of a monstrous distortion of Papageno in Mozart’s The Magic Flute). Beauty is beautiful in the form of Julia acted by Zdena Studenkova. Her father (Vaclav Voska-Otec) plays well a paternalistic though shrewd businessman and thief who steals the jewels and money laid out in the castle of the beast. The Beast is outstandingly conceived when bestial but pretty bland when transformed into a handsome prince.
Some viewers have sensed a political message in Herz’s film yet I perceived no hard evidence of that. And Herz’s 18th century adaptation is no replication of Cocteau’s fantasy style but his own highly personal dark horror-take on the fairy tale.
A gloomy opening with its mist, a forest, robbers of a caravan, a beast in the undergrowth and the death (?) of Julia’s mother is highly accomplished. We are thrown into a Gothic terrain beautifully photographed by Jiri Machane. Julia’s father’s journey to the castle and subsequent treatment by the unseen beast is compelling. Yet it’s only on Julia’s entrapment, in the labyrinth of the castle, that Beauty and the Beast really pulls you into a tension of identity centering round the beast. The director employs an alter-ego or mental split of conscience. The POV and voice-over warns the beast that he cannot escape his beast’s body and should not attempt to do so. For me this worked brilliantly.
There is an enchanting moment when beauty (Julia) kisses the hand of the beast, who she can now see, and the bird-man’s claw disappears to reveal a normal human hand. The beast is encouraged to think he will be freed from his monstrous shape but his inner voice warns him that it is even more dangerous to be part beast / part man.
The superb photography and art design and the mysterious organ music soundtrack of Petr Hapka of Beauty and the Beast might have been sufficient for it to equal, though not surpass La Belle et la Bete. However this adaptation has some quite annoying flaws. Zdena Studenkova’s performance is unsteady. At home with the family I found her too passive a character. Things improve when she meets the beast but her facial expressions switch back and forth from genuine disturbance to winsome indifference. And Julia’s two conceited and greedy sisters are unconvincing and edge towards caricature.
However the film’s worst sin is the transformation of the beast into a handsome prince who walks away hand in hand with Beauty. This is shot in a saccharine cardboard manner to give the signalled courtship the soft focus look of a 70’s TV commercial containing not an inkling of irony to redeem itself.
Overall Beauty and The Beast has a powerful and authentic sense of the macabre. But is let down when the ugly duckling becomes a beautiful swan. I didn’t really care. For me this hindered the sexual freedom of identity the couple struggle towards. No proper resolution. Bestiality and fear of sex vanishes. But Beauty and the Beast’s clunky transformation scenes, in dream and reality, cling on. They feel like a sentimental addition rather than what the story required - a natural move towards love and maturity. A strange film that both greatly excites and then quickly disappoints.
- Alan Price
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