“Pure magic”: The movie Tilda Swinton will never forget watching for the first time
Every so often, a film comes along that is so breathtakingly beautiful that you can’t quite believe that it exists. It comes to occupy a small part of your brain, where you battle between wanting to show it to everyone you love and keeping it a secret to be enjoyed alone.
There is such a magical feeling to stumbling upon a film that leaves you speechless; it’s poetry in motion, the miracle of art and life colliding. Tilda Swinton felt this otherworldly joy of experiencing pure cinema when, many years ago, she first watched Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête.
No matter how old we get, we can all remember certain fairytales, the ones that lulled us to sleep as children or perhaps even kept us awake. The Disney version of many classics has become a definitive version, like the 1991 animation, which brought Belle and the Beast together, but for Swinton, it’s the older, much more dream-like version of the story that remains one of her favourite movies.
Cocteau was an avant-garde God, his art manifesting across various mediums, and he seemed to be a master of them all – you can recognise his sparse yet beautiful drawings anywhere, while he poured himself into writing poetry and even a few novels, like Les Enfants terribles, and by bringing this poetic sensibility to the screen, he made his first film in the 1920s, which is now lost, only to craft a series of beautifully surreal works like The Blood of a Poet and Orphée.
Playing with myth and fairytale, Cocteau brought dreamy imagery into contact with realism, and entering his cinematic world feels like stepping into an alternative dimension. In The Blood of a Poet, we meet Lee Miller dressed as a living statue, and Orphée features some rather innovative point-of-view shots that amaze all these years later.
La Belle et la Bête, however, is arguably his most visually impressive, with hazy black-and-white images creating a sumptuous and ethereal atmosphere that you just long to jump into – if there was a Narnia-esque wardrobe that took you to a deeply cinematic and poetic landscape, you’d want to arrive inside the world of La Belle et la Bête.
With impressive chiaroscuro lighting, plenty of candles, and glimmers of light which simply illuminate a certain aspect of a scene, Cocteau’s vision is one of pure artistic genius.
Describing the beauty of the film to BFI, Swinton said, “Cocteau’s resplendent fairy tale. Images you will never forget. The chandelier arms, the transcendent beauty of Jean Marais, the pearl of a drop of dew on a rose. Pure magic.”
While Disney infused the classic tale – in which a smart young woman falls for a beastly figure when she learns to look past his exterior – with plenty of songs and inanimate objects coming to life, Cocteau’s version is profoundly lyrical, like a moving painting, a poem brought to life in thick shadows and pure aesthetic brilliance. It made Swinton realise just how transformative a film can be, and now it stands alongside other favourites in her collection, like Tokyo Story and Journey to Italy.
