Beauty and the Beast

The story

Belle keeps house for her merchant father, two vain sisters, and a reckless brother. The brother's friend Avenant wants to marry her; she refuses him. When her father loses his fortune and takes the wrong road home, he shelters in a château where the doors open themselves and dinner appears without a host. He picks a rose from the garden for Belle. The Beast appears and offers the classic sentence: die for the theft, or send a daughter in your place.

Belle goes. The Beast treats her as the mistress of the house, and every evening he asks the same question: will she marry him? Every evening she says no. But the ritual softens — fear turns to curiosity, disgust to pity, pity to something neither can name. When a magic mirror shows her father ill, the Beast lets her go home for a week, trusting her with the glove that carries its wearer anywhere and the golden key to the pavilion that holds his treasure. If she does not come back, he tells her, he will die.

Her sisters delay her. Avenant and her brother ride off to rob the pavilion. Belle returns by the glove and finds the Beast dying beside the water — and the ending arrives as a crossing: an arrow from the pavilion's statue strikes Avenant, who falls wearing the Beast's face, while the Beast rises transformed into a prince wearing Avenant's.

1945–1946

Enchantment after the Occupation

The film was shot in the year after the Liberation, in a France short of everything a film needs. Film stock was rationed and inconsistent, electricity failed mid-take, costume fabric was scrounged, and Cocteau — a poet directing his first narrative feature at fifty-six — was ill through much of the shoot. He kept a production diary, published in 1946 as La Belle et la Bête: journal d'un film, and it turned the film's troubles into literature of its own.

The production moved between the Saint-Maurice and Épinay studios, the manor country of the Touraine for Belle's farmhouse, and the park of the Château de Raray in the Oise for the Beast's domain.

Raray needed almost no dressing. Its sculpted hunting balustrades already looked like the film Cocteau intended to make — court ritual and animal life carved into the same stone. One of the poorest years in French production ended up yielding its most opulent-looking film.

How the magic was made

Cocteau favored tricks that could be performed in front of the lens, or made by running the film itself differently. The famous effects are almost all sleights of the simplest kind:

• The living candelabra — real human arms through concealed openings in the walls, their owners hidden behind the set.
• Candles that light themselves — the crew blew them out, and the film ran backward.
• Belle's floating entrance — a wheeled platform, slow motion, and curtains doing the rest.
• The magic glove — an edit, nothing more: a gesture in one place completed in another.
• The mirror — Cocteau's signature threshold, a surface that opens instead of reflecting, fifteen years after The Blood of a Poet and four before Orphée.
• The Beast's smoking hands — smoke rising from his fingers after a kill: appetite made visible as guilt.

Henri Alekan lit the farmhouse like Dutch genre painting and the castle like an engraving come to life. Cocteau described the look he wanted from Alekan in four words and a breeze:

“Relief, contours, contrastes et quelque chose d'impondérable, comme un vent léger qui circule.”

Relief, contours, contrasts — and something imponderable, like a light wind moving through.

The Beast under the fur

Cocteau's brief for the creature was exact:

“Faire un monstre, qui au lieu d'être épouvantable, soit séduisant, de cette séduction du monstre.”

A monster who, instead of being horrifying, seduces — with the monster's own kind of seduction. The makeup artist Hagop Arakélian built it as a three-part mask of fine tulle with animal and human hair implanted strand by strand: beard, wig, muzzle. It went on in five hours a day — three for the face, one for each clawed hand — and Marais, who could barely eat through the mouthpiece, lived on purées and compotes for the length of the shoot. His own dog, Moulouk, had suggested the fur.

Cocteau insisted Marais's clear human eyes stay visible inside the animal head. The performance lives there, and in posture, breath, and hands — an animal trying, painfully, to behave like a courtly man.

Three faces of Jean Marais

Marais plays all three men in Belle's life: Avenant, the handsome suitor she refuses; the Beast she learns to love; and Prince Ardent, the reward. The casting binds the film's ending into a knot no later adaptation has tried to tie. When the Beast rises transformed, he wears the face of the man Belle rejected — and she says so. The resemblance troubles her.

The airborne finale gives the fairy tale its promised ending and leaves a crack running through it. Belle loved a being whose shame and gentleness had become specific to her; the prince is a stranger with a familiar face.

The happy ending arrives wearing the face she refused.

The triple casting also carries the film's off-screen history. Marais was Cocteau's collaborator, muse, and partner, and the film they made together keeps asking where monstrosity actually lives — in an animal face, in appetite, in social cruelty, or in the wish to possess another person. It never quite answers.

Before Disney, and after

The tale came to Cocteau with two centuries of pictures already attached. Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont published the version he adapted in 1756; Walter Crane illustrated it in 1875; Gustave Doré's engravings and Vermeer's interiors shaped how the film's world was lit and furnished.

Disney's 1991 version arrives forty-five years later, and the household objects that sing in it descend from furniture that watches in this one. The two films share a tale, not a temperature: Disney's castle explains itself and moves toward affirmation; Cocteau's is intimate, erotic, and faintly funereal, and its arms hold their candles in silence.

The film's strangest afterlife belongs to Philip Glass, whose 1994 La Belle et la Bête removes the dialogue and Auric's score entirely and sets a sung opera in their place, performed live in synchronization with the projected film — the actors' mouths moving to new music. An adaptation of an adaptation, faithful to the film's own belief that transformation is the point. Gaumont-side restorers gave the film itself a second life too: the 2013 digital restoration premiered at Cannes Classics, sixty-seven years after the film competed there new.

Within Cocteau's work it is the middle passage between mirrors: The Blood of a Poet opened the threshold in 1930, and Orphée would drive it into the underworld in 1950, with Marais again at the wheel.

More by Jean Cocteau

DrawingErik Satiepublished 1923DrawingP. Picasso — Igor Stravinskypublished 1923PlayLe Bel Indifférent1940FilmOrphée1950BalletParade1917Film · French avant-garde cinemaThe Blood of a Poetmade 1930; released 1932