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Jean Cocteau wants magic but he also wants the tricks to be seen, a certain childhood naïveté is the ideal. (Credits scrawled on a blackboard give way to a clapperboard and the open-sesame of imagination, "il était une fois...") The virginal mind on display is Belle's (Josette Day), humbly washing floors while her sisters preen and sulk, "witches acting like princesses." From prosaic rusticity to dangerous enchantment, trees part like curtains for the father (Marcel André) lost in the woods and there's the castle of living statues and treasure pavilions. The gleaming rose plucked from the garden incurs the wrath of the Beast (Jean Marais), a leonine brooder, majestically raspy. "One half of him is in constant struggle with the other half," marvels the maiden who comes to see the nobility under the fulminating fur. Phantom of the Opera, King Kong and Citizen Kane are among the works acknowledged, also Rebecca for the portrait of marital jitters purring behind it all. This is where Vermeer meets Méliès, Cocteau means to dazzle and does so—the heroine literally glides into her captor's lair, disembodied arms holding candelabras point the way, movement is slowed down or reversed as necessary. The courtliness of the fanged host is palpably tinged with torment and feral hunger, a droll moment has him struggling mightily not to tear into a deer while by his beloved's side. "There are many men more monstrous than you, though they conceal it well." The pure of heart can weep diamonds, elsewhere the spellbound mirror makes a monkey out of the wicked gaze. A lustrous benchmark, cinema as something like musical sculpture, intensely erotic. The missed arrow at the beginning has a role to play at the close, Belle's disappointment at the metamorphosis ("it's almost as if you miss my ugliness") is followed by the Baudelairean élévation. Powell and Pressburger waste no time putting together The Red Shoes. Cinematography by Henri Alekan. With Mila Parély, Nane Germon, Michel Auclair, Raoul Marco, and Christian Marquand. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |