A Film Canon

Although the Orphic Trilogy may be a more sophisticated interrogation of Cocteau's perennial dream-space - the world beyond the mirror - Beauty And The Beast goes further in aestheticising it, creating a more genuinely subliminal experience. In particular, cinematographer Henri Alekan and set designer Lucien Carré suffuse the Beast's (Jean Marais) palace with the mirror's pearly sheen, such that every object exudes a light smoke, or mist, and every movement is imbued with a balletic slowness, culminating with Belle (Josette Day) and the Beast's aerial dance. This enlivens the palace to a greater extent than any previous cinematic space, as evinced in the proliferation of real, disembodied hands and eyes - holding candelabras, gazing out from behind friezes, protruding from the table to pour wine - as well as the Beast's own continuity with it, which ensures that his eyes take on a quite distinct existence from his spectacular, but palpably inanimate, suit; or, rather, that his eyes enliven his suit, creating an uncanny nexus between beauty and grotesquerie that is encapsulated in Cocteau's decision to simultaneously cast Marais as Belle's worldly lover. The result is a subtle, poignant plea for the pleasures of the apparently perverse ("What's wrong, Belle? It's almost as if you miss my ugliness?"), as well as a subsumption of every object into its fantastic, or fetishistic, potential - that is, the imaginative gaze of the inner child that Cocteau addresses in the prologue - explaining the increasing emptiness of Belle's father's house, as well as its poetic contrast with the five secrets of the Beast's power (rose, mirror, key, glove, horse) and his gift of crystal-tears.