Magic, mystery

By Efi Kremmyda

To start the new year the Al liance Francaise invited cinema fans to watch a classic by Jean Cocteau, the poet, painter, film maker and discoverer of the famous actor, Jean Marais who died recently.

Cocteau had chosen as his theme a fairy tale: La Belle et la Bete. The Beauty and the Beast.

The Beauty and the Beast is a story, told and retold -of a beautiful prince whom a curse has condemned to live under a monstrous shape from which he can only be delivered by the love of a woman who will not be repelled by his awful appearance. The sexual overtones are evident. The youngest daughter, unlike her more worldly, more assertive sisters, is still in love with her father.

She wants to remain a child. She is afraid of other men: their aggressiveness, their physical appetites, repell her; they are beasts. She only goes to them when her father is threatened, she then offers herself in sacrifice to the lustful monster to redeem her father's life. Actually she becomes an adult woman, capable of bold initiatives, when she discovers that it is her turn to protect her father. And then comes the twist in the story. She tames the beast. Or rather the beast becomes tame to please her. Love is the civilizing influence. To this Cocteau has added other perspectives- the ancient myth of double personality, the notions of good and evil, the Christian idea that the beauty of the body does not necessarily correspond with the purity of the soul,and that the devil too can be beautiful.

The beauty of the film comes from the fact that Cocteau has been able to recreate the atmosphere of magic and mystery through which we can travel back to the lost evidences of childhood.

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