Just finished watching this for the 2nd time. No doubt, Jean Cocteau & crew did an tremendous job of bringing this fairytale to life. My only huge gripe is that the original story from 1740 is pretty awful. Cocteau himself seemed to give us a wink about this with the preface to the movie, asking the viewer to approach the story as a child who accepts the unbelievable. Funny thing is you think he's talking about 'unbelievable' magic and supernatural events, but now I realize that the preface was, at least in part, referring to the unbelievable ways characters behave. Belle is dumb as a post. She keeps falling for the same paper thin tricks by her wicked sisters, and each time after she turns out to be the patsy of a scam she doesn't have the brains to say 'gosh maybe I oughta wise up'.
I went back and researched if this is how the original fairytale was written, and sure enough it was. Even worse. The original work even had a 'extra happy ending' where it turned out that Belle was actually related to her lover the prince.🤢 Nothing like incest between royals to put a smile on our faces, eh. Mercifully that was one of the major points that got quietly edited out by Beaumont in 1756 and also cut from Cocteau's version we see here.
Cocteau tried to clean it up a little further, giving more human motivations to the characters and not just pure selfishness or stupidity. For example, in the original 1740 and even 1756 edits, Belle's father is as selfish as the rest, sacrificing Belle to the beast in return for his own life (he even escorts her back to Beast's castle as a sacrificial lamb). Cocteau softened this a bit by making the father forbid Belle to take his place but she sneaks off anyway. Even that was a bit weak because if the father were truly a good guy, he wouldn't even bother coming back to propose the bargain; he would just submit to the Beast on the spot.
Those are just a few of many source flaws which are hard to overlook, despite Cocteau's introductory plea for us to forgive the story. Unfortunately it's just too distracting. Maybe Cocteau should've rewritten the story completely à la Disney which at least gave Belle a few brain cells. Cocteau did a fantastic job of rewriting the Orpheus myth in 1950, one of my favorite films ever, setting it in contemporary times and replacing Orpheus the Greek musician with a modern poet obsessed with transmissions he's receiving on his car radio. So we know Cocteau isn't afraid to bust out the red pen and make some heavy revisions to canonical works. But here he stayed pretty true.
So overall a mixed reaction from me. On a technical & artistic level I'd rate it a gobjillion, but the story gets a 3 or 4 at best. Averages out to maybe an 8 (edit: bumping it up to 9 after reading Cocteau’s notes, see post #11 below). But I guess it's kinda like when you see a great musician play a song that's really dumb. Like Hendrix doing "Wild Thing" (which I actually learned to like over the years 😅), I guess you just overlook the weak lyrics and brainless 3 chord song structure and instead focus on the technical wizardry of the performer.
لم تجد الفلم أو المسلسل ؟ سجل دخولك و انشئها
هل تريد تقييم او اضافة هذا العنصر للقائمة؟
لست عضو؟
رد بواسطة Philippe LeMarchand
بتاريخ سبتمبر 26, 2023 في 12:01 مساءا
The problem I have with most "Beauty and the Beast" adaptations (apart from the 80's show which included George RR Martin on the staff) is that the moral of the story is that someone who looks beastly may still be a decent person who is worthy of love on the inside. However, in a move that still features in teenage fiction and movies (I'm still smarting over the end of "Pretty in Pink"), it's not enough to be a good person, you have to be attractive. So "the beast" transforms into a handsome prince (and Andy picks Bland over Ducky).
I'm not recommending it (I wasn't impressed), but at least in the recent Japanese "Once Upon A Crime"
SPOILERS BELOW
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
the prince stuck with his "hideous" true love even after she had gained a scar. OK, after a makeover you hardly saw the scar and she looked gorgeous, but at least she wasn't magically turned into a beauty.
رد بواسطة rooprect
بتاريخ سبتمبر 26, 2023 في 4:04 مساءا
Great GREAT point. That’s probably the biggest source flaw, that ugly is ugly. And for the story to end happy it requires a transformation to handsome. That’s very much in line with the original story’s twist that Belle turns out to be a princess. Ugly & poor are unworthy of happiness. Everyone must get transformed to handsome descendants of royalty.
I didn’t read past your spoiler warning for Once Upon a Crime because I’ll probably end up checking it out. I’m a big fan of Japanese films because they often buck the trope by portraying average or even lowbrow characters as the triumphant hero.
But yea I’m glad you pointed out that huge flaw in the original story. Let’s face it, the majority of children’s fables are terribly flawed. That’s probably because simple morality plays have to rely on simple stereotypes to define right & wrong. Handsome vs Ugly.
On that note it’s interesting in this version that Cocteau did add the character Avenant. The character Avenant is played by the same actor who plays the Beast, except Avenant is a selfish scoundrel who is handsome on the outside. There’s a reversal at the end when Avenant becomes ugly while the Beast becomes handsome. But at the same time Belle reveals that she’s bothered by the fact that Beast now looks like the handsome Avenant.
So maybe that was another one of Cocteau’s subtle attempts to address the original source flaw and throw a twist on the handsome/ugly stereotype?
رد بواسطة bratface
بتاريخ سبتمبر 26, 2023 في 7:20 مساءا
You have forgotten that in the original story the 'Prince' was turned into a 'beast' by an evil fairy for turning down her advances. Only by finding true love, despite his ugliness, could the curse be broken. Also, it really shouldn't be called 'incest' as they were only 'cousins' in the original story.
رد بواسطة rooprect
بتاريخ سبتمبر 26, 2023 في 7:57 مساءا
Marriage between cousins is incest in half the USA, illegal and certainly sketchy at best. But that's not the main point really; the point as Philippe pointed out is the ridiculous way of portraying good = handsome, rich, royal blood, whereas evil = physical unattractiveness, poverty and 'low breeding'. The original story ended in a way that was tantamount to Aryan racism: even after true love 'saved' the Prince, they couldn't get married because Belle wasn't of pure royal blood. Until magically it turned out that Belle and the Prince are cousins! I call that awful writing, don't you?
رد بواسطة rooprect
بتاريخ سبتمبر 26, 2023 في 8:28 مساءا
lmao this is a fun read: 25 Dark and Disturbing Original Children's Fairy Tales
Highlights include:
Sleeping Beauty - It's not a kiss that awakens her. She actually gets raped by the King while she's asleep, then she gives birth (while asleep), and her baby sucks a splinter out of her finger which is what wakes her up.
The Frog Prince - It's not a kiss that turns the frog into a prince, the princess chops the frog's head off. Talk about ugly shaming!
Mulan - Mulan comes home to find her father dead, her mother remarried, and she (Mulan) is sold into prostitution (made into the Khan's concubine). She kills herself.
The Fox and the Hound - absolutely nothing about friendship, the hounds chase the fox who's being hunted to death, the fox lures a hound onto the train tracks where the hound is run over, then a 2nd dog chases the fox until the fox has a literal heart attack and dies. The dog is so tired that the dog's master shoots him in the head.
😬😬😬
Maybe it's a good thing we have Disney after all....
رد بواسطة Philippe LeMarchand
بتاريخ سبتمبر 27, 2023 في 4:55 صباحا
Re: Cousins, it is acceptable in many parts of the world, plus the term can include people who are less directly related. Also, amongst "royalty" it has been accepted from at least Ancient Egypt (who went closer than cousins). Got to keep those bloodlines "pure"!
Re: "Once Upon A Crime", I didn't hate it, but it had way too much of the mugging "acting" that seems common in East Asian media for my taste - particularly one of the witches, who seemed to have graduated from the Rita Repulsa School for OTT Performing Arts.
If you want a slightly better revisionist fairly tale, I still have a soft spot for the early episodes of "Once Upon A Time" before everyone "woke up" (and it was way better when Prince Charming was still in a coma). If you read comics, Bill Willingham's "Fables" are well worth a read apart. I think it features probably the only "wedding scene" in media to bring tears of joy for the happy couple to my eyes. The "Everafter" spin-off where he really leaned into the whole "It's OK to do bad things to people if you are doing it to protect the 'good' side" was a bit distasteful, though.
Ooh! Just read new issues were due for release last year. Will have to track them down.
P.S. Fables was in development as a TV show at NBC, who dropped it and went on to make "Grimm". Then ABC took it up, but decided to go for "Once Upon A Time". Hmmm...
رد بواسطة bratface
بتاريخ سبتمبر 27, 2023 في 2:27 مساءا
Which turned out to be pretty 'grim', as in pretty dreadful!
رد بواسطة wonder2wonder
بتاريخ سبتمبر 27, 2023 في 6:22 مساءا
The title of that article is a bit confusing. Dark and disturbing, perhaps, but not all original.
For example, Mulan as described in the article is Chu Renhuo (褚人穫) version which was published in 1695 during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912 AD/CE). It is not the original one. The story of Mulan can be traced back to the "Ballad of Mùlán" (木蘭詩) which is from the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534 AD/CE) and this has a happy ending.
رد بواسطة Philippe LeMarchand
بتاريخ سبتمبر 28, 2023 في 5:39 صباحا
Yeah, at that time I'd try to give most "genre" stuff quite a few episodes, but that lasted 2 or 3. Oddly, I do know people who love it who don't seem to watch a lot of things. (Maybe they have nothing better to compare it to?)
رد بواسطة rooprect
بتاريخ سبتمبر 28, 2023 في 5:47 مساءا
LATE BREAKING UPDATE
Hey I’m jumping back to this point because I just read Cocteau’s release notes, and he does address this flaw very deliberately. Like I guessed above, the scoundrel character “Avenant” and the Beast’s transformation to the image of Avenant was Cocteau’s way of turning the handsome/ugly stereotype on its head. Like Belle, the audience is supposed to be left uneasy & preferring the Beast’s ‘ugly’ self over the new handsome prince.
It’s the perfect way of correcting the story’s flaw without changing anything: turn the ‘happy ending’ into an ironic one. Not enough to seem like a rewrite but just enough to make us prefer the Beast (like Belle does) and maybe on a deeper level make us question why ‘handsome’ is supposed to be better.
Here are Cocteau’s own words:
رد بواسطة Philippe LeMarchand
بتاريخ سبتمبر 29, 2023 في 7:04 صباحا
It's good to know that Cocteau was aware of the "problem", but I do wonder if his solution would have been understood by the average moviegoer. That said, Belle does look disappointed that she's lost "The Beast". Did they have Furries in 1946? ;o)
رد بواسطة rooprect
بتاريخ سبتمبر 29, 2023 في 7:41 صباحا
Yup. If the message is lost on the audience, no matter how well done, then the film fails in its objective to awaken minds. This same phenomenon happened with Veerhoven's excellent anti-war film "Starship Troopers" where much of the audience missed the satire and took it as a serious "pro-war" action flick. 🤦Or more recently there's Weird Al's scathing satire of rock biopics which flew over the heads of some of the audience--they thought he was being serious and hated the 'documentary' for not being true 🤦🤦🤦
Not sure if we should blame the artist for being too esoteric, or if we should blame the audience for being thick as a brick.
In that same note by Cocteau (which is here in its entirety: "Once Upon a Time"), he did report some success but mostly just with young girls.
But he also implies that most of the European crowds missed the point, and he hopes that American audiences will be more perceptive since America is the home of Poe and at the time more progressive toward new & challenging ideas (my how times have changed)!
رد بواسطة Philippe LeMarchand
بتاريخ سبتمبر 29, 2023 في 9:18 صباحا
I was trying to think of an example of a film that I hear people raving about because it shows x that I always think, "Erm... I pretty sure that it's actually saying something quite different". "Starship Troopers" is a great example.
Interesting that Cocteau felt his intentions hadn't been fully grasped.