OK, so after seeing a lot of directorial top 10 lists on Twitter and Discord, I decided mostly on a whim to watch Jean Cocteau La Belle et la Bête. What follows is an incredibly loose assortment of my thoughts on the film.
- Cocteau strikes me as a dramatist first and foremost, concerned more with the emotional affect his shots convey than any meaning they might devote. (I can't help but feel the mythological well the film draws on - Beauty and the Beast, obviously, but also Cinderella and King Lear - also plays into this.) Fortunately for him, he's incredibly good at staging the right shots when the story needs him to.
- As far as themes are concerned, though, the film is mostly character study with some social critique sprinkled on top to taste. We begin the film with an early-modern mise-en-scene that would imply some conflict between an ascendant bourgeoisie and an entrenched aristocracy, elaborate on that by introducing the Beast as a ruthlessly composed aristocrat (as though his bestial nature has simply served to accentuate his underlying aristocratic station)...and then we mostly drop that until about the one hour mark in favor of the Beast struggling to reconcile his love for Belle with his bestial nature. This isn't bad per se, but it's definitely something to be aware of going into the movie.
- It strikes me that as far as we know, the Beast never lies to Belle. Her family is willing to explore her left and right, but the Beast's good intentions toward her are genuine from beginning to end.
*reads about Cocteau's intentions with the ending*That doesn't surprise me. The sewage runoff part does, but not the part about the ending.