Belle en het beest

I've seen Brotherhood of the Wolf by Christophe Gans before, an interesting but in my opinion inconsistent film. Beauty and the Beast is quite similar. As for the audiovisual aspect, I'm at a loss for words, because it was just beautiful. The visual effects were very good and that was on a pretty low budget. The soundtrack was amazing, I absolutely loved the title song. As for the costumes, the designers deserve praise to the ground as it was a complete fashion show. It's just that, on the other hand, the story gets on the way. The relationship between the Beauty and the Beast was a little too aloof for my taste, without any development to illuminate the ending. In short, a visually sumptuous spectacle with a wonderful musical score, which unfortunately suffers from screenwriting flaws. (02.05.2014)

Gans understands me. That his version of the classic fairy tale would be a ticket to the deepest hell for most lovers of understated minimalism was clear from the first blow of the clapperboard, which itself had to be set so cleverly set that the clapper didn't blow away the hundreds of rose petals on the powdered artificial snow. And truly, it dangerously often leaps several kilometers across the boundaries of ultimate kitsch to somewhere in the vicinity of Thomas Kinkade. But given the fact that we have an alibi from the start that this is going to be a storybook illustration, and we'll learn at the end that it was probably the imagination of a simple country woman who likes her bearded husband and a garden full of roses, I can actually sit back and enjoy every hideously over-stylized shot, looking exactly as I imagined fairy-tale realms as a little tyke. Which perhaps makes me a closeted gay, because that rubber tree for artificial flowers was for this film a bridge too far. (08.07.2014)

I truly don’t understand why France films so many remakes that have nothing to offer except for the actors. Purely because they attempt to film these classic themes in absolutely classic ways that someone’s already tried before and succeeded (since they were the first one to do it). Just off the top of my head, I can think of Fanfan la Tulipe or Angélique. This Beauty and the Beast hints at wanting to be different, but in the end, its fairytale-ness and its fantasy-ness don’t offer anything else other than a classic fairytale with a classic premise and a classic flow of storytelling. But Léa Seydoux has at least proved herself. (02.04.2015)