inklingfair Last night I had planned to read a book while having wine and cheese on crackers – my first self-date in ages – but remembered that Dadengs had given me a copy of La Belle et la Bête which felt more fitting. Everyone was asleep, it was raining a bit, and I turned the lights out and settled in.
I fully expected something dark and disturbingly deconstructed like Snow, Glass, Apples, and was pleasantly surprised at the gentle storytelling. Sure, there were dark bits – it is, after all, Beauty and the Beast – but the treatment was gorgeous. It reminded me of Pan’s Labyrinth, with the light motes, the creeping tendrils, the dreamlike discovery of the castle, the moldering ruins. This is how fantasy is supposed to look like. It was the first time I saw this fairy tale played out in scale: the glittering court before the curse, the deer hunt, the labyrinth garden.
Belle here isn’t spunky or bookish like the Disney version, but she similarly goes against convention – she doesn’t care for girlish trinkets and would rather garden than go to balls. The sisters are airheads, as expected, though the brothers seem a bit too forced into the story (or perhaps that’s because we’ve never seen them introduced in most versions of the story). The father is the quintessential suffering good man. The Beast is… well, more human, and a tad one-dimensional, and I’m sad to say lacking in the compelling and mysterious department. Perhaps if he wasn’t, Belle would have been nosier instead of sleeping so much.
That said, it was very much Belle’s story and everyone else was her foil, including the Beast. When you think about it, in traditional versions of Beauty and the Beast, the happy ending is ultimately the Beast’s. He gets his castle back, his riches, his looks, and he gets the girl, to boot. But here it is undeniably and satisfyingly Belle’s.
Photo by Mathilda Khoo on Unsplash
