Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film

"The film La Belle et la Bête by Jean Cocteau , which came out in 1946, is one of the most beautiful adaptations of a fairy tale that has ever been filmed. It appears on many critics’ lists of the great French movies. Cocteau was a great poet, writer and polymath. He was also a film director and made some beautiful films. This is the diary of how he put together his film of “Beauty and the Beast.” It’s a very honest diary about his experiences; he tells you about the difficulties. They started filming just a few weeks after World War Two ended. You hear about power cuts, the theft of props—because they were filming in the countryside and people were so impoverished. You hear about the lack of funds and about sickness, with people falling ill while they were filming. He’s very specific and very vivid about the technical challenges. You hear about smoke machines and magnesium torches and red powder, and a thousand mechanical bits and pieces. “Part of the coziness of fairy tales is that you feel those familiar structures” Most of all, what you get is the sense of Cocteau suffering terribly physically and psychologically whilst he was directing this film. Amongst other things, he was suffering from impetigo, lymphadenitis, bronchitis, jaundice and toothache. He had to be treated with penicillin, injections of copper sulfate and many other pills. He was so disfigured by the rashes on his face that he went around in a veiled hat so the crew couldn’t see his face. There’s a weird sense of the story that he was telling and his own experiences bleeding together. He articulates this in the diary. He says at one point that he felt “he was being bitten into as if by a beast.” At another point, he says a “ferocious beast has got its paws in the nape of my neck.” At the same time, his lover, Jean Marais, was playing the Beast and was suffering so much from the makeup and glue that they had to use to stick the costume on him that he was struggling with his circulation and fell ill as well. It’s a disaster. It reads almost like a moral fable of why nobody should ever try and make a movie. But there’s also a sense of fairy tale about it all because the film itself is absolutely beautiful. It’s one of the most decorous films you could imagine. Cocteau is whispering his secret into the well. He says himself that it would be criminal to make the film suffer and reflect the drudgery of his suffering and ugliness. He kept his suffering in the diary, whilst he tried to put all the beauty into the film. He said he was doing it not only for himself but for France. He felt that he needed to make something beautiful to help France emerge from the squalor of the war. You really feel for Cocteau as you’re reading it. It’s wonderful knowing that he produced this masterpiece. It’s sad to think of how much he suffered in the making of it. It’s a wonderful insight into the creation of art, I think. He sees it very much as a fable and he wants to make it into this very beautiful thing. I think the discussion about what the story means will probably have been done at the screenplay stage: at this stage, he’s thinking about the technical difficulties of putting that story on the screen. It’s about the props and the costumes and the blocking and the movement of the cameras, and his own struggles. In some ways, you have to watch the film alongside it, but probably one of the key aspects of the way that he interprets the story is that his sympathy is very much with the Beast. There’s a sense at the end when the Beast turns into the prince—and I think it’s often a problem with versions of “Beauty and the Beast”—that you, as the audience, aren’t sure if he wasn’t better as the Beast. He is this rather insipid, non-entity as a prince, whereas as the Beast, he’s got character. Perhaps Cocteau’s experiences of feeling ugly and broken and damaged meant that his version of the story identifies more closely than others might with the Beast. It does feel like Belle doesn’t get the personality that some other versions have given her. It’s also a film of its time, of the 1940s."