A beautiful young woman takes her father's place as the prisoner of a mysterious beast, who wishes to marry her.
EN
“Although Beauty and the Beast was much maligned by the New Wave filmmakers, Cocteau reveals in his Diary of a Film the lyric nature of the experience and his instincts as an auteur filmmaker: ‘The rhythm of the film is one of narrative. I am telling the story . . . . The characters don't seem to be living a life of their own, but a life that is being narrated. Perhaps that's how it should be in a fairy tale.’
Thus Beauty and the Beast becomes Cocteau's own tale, in the narrative tradition of retelling and reworking the classic thematic of folklore. He reaffirms near the end his inner compulsion to make this film, against all odds: ‘But this had to be attempted once: a poet telling a story through the medium of the camera.’”
Rebecca M. Pauly1
- 1Rebecca M. Pauly, “Beauty and the Beast: From Fable to Film,” Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, United States) 17, no. 2 (1989).
