LA BELLE ET LA BETE, 1942, Dir. Jean Cocteau
My first approach of this fairy tale was through Disney as “Beauty and the Beast”. When I was young, I didn’t really understand the meaning of love, yet I could understand the strong bond between the Beauty and the Beast. On the contrary to the colourful world and lively characters made by Disney, in La Belle et la bete, it has a strong, dark theatrical presence, and the characters act like they are on stage.
The story is but familiar to all of us, to help her father escapes death, the Beauty, Belle has to live with a beast in its cursed castle, where all the servants are speaking objects. Though saying the beast would take Belle’s life instead of her father, it asks her to marry it every night. While strongly opposes to the proposal, Belle gradually reveals the curtain behind the beast and the cursed castle. Eventually, she sees the human side of the beast and grows fond of him. Then at the end when she knows the beast is deeply in love with her, she realizes she also has fallen for it. Then all of a sudden, the beast turns into a beautiful prince. It is a fairy tale, is it not.
The moral of the movie is that love can triumphant outer appearance, as long as the two can see each other soul and devoted for each other. What I learn from watching the movie and life itself is that life would never be like fairy tale, the one you love would never *pop* in all sudden becomes beautiful, but to you, when you have fallen in love, he or she is the most gorgeous.
There is one more out-of-topic thing I think about when writing the reflection. Despite being the fearsome beast, it has a man heart, a man soul inside. Here is when I remember people say that inside a man there is always a beast. People you meet always appear nice at first, but when things come to light, they always have a motive behind what they do, a smirk masked in a friendly smile, a claws paw masked in a firm handshake. Girls like nice men, but why are nice? They want girls, right. So is making it the other way around actually better, when you can only see the true soul after all the courage to look into the beast’s fur?
I also thought about inside the beast, there is a soul of a man, but inside the man there is a beast, just like looking at a mirror in front of you reflecting you and a mirror behind. It won’t stop reflecting. Like when you realise, men are beasts after all. This is way too irrelevant from the movie reviews, but I think it’s ok to express my thought in my blog.
Interim Online Review 14/12/2010
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