Crossings
THIS IS flashback time. Please bear with us.
Once upon a time, there was a fairy tale. It was called Beauty and the Beast.
It was an "English" fairy tale - though later one came to know it was of French provenance - and it pitted, as the best of fairy tales do, women against women. Two vain, greedy and jealous sisters gang up against a third, innocent one. In the English versions, the youngest is called Beauty. In the 300-year-old French tale, her name is Belle, which means the same.
The story is one of avarice and innocence, chance and choice, beauty and disfigurement. But most of all, it is about the transforming power that is love.
The three sisters are the daughters of a poor merchant. The two older ones want money and pleasure, but Beauty wants only a rose from her father when he is setting out on a journey. He happens to pluck one from the enchanted garden of the Beast, who lets him go only on the condition that he sends back one of his daughters to stand in for him.
Beauty comes in his place. She is repulsed by the Beast, who proposes to her every night; she refuses, but eventually begins to care for him. When she leaves him to visit her family, she realises that the Beast is dying of a broken heart in her absence and runs back to him. He, of course, obliges by turning into the handsome prince.
This story, with its promise of the transformation that is the key to the magic of fairy tales, was made into a wonderful film by Jean Cocteau in 1946. Unlike in the other tales, where the transformation often happens by chance - from sleeping to waking, from frog to prince, from duckling to swan - in Beauty and the Beast, it happens within, and before. Beauty learns to love the Beast before he turns into a prince.
Cut to now. Obviously this was not cool enough for Disney, which got into the business of re-inventing fairy tales, especially the ones with heroines, such as Snow-White, Sleeping Beauty and the Little Mermaid, long ago. The "Disney Princesses" all looked like each other, only distinguished by the colour of their gowns and hair and, rarely, their skin. The magic came from high-end animation.
So Belle (she got back her French name), in the 1991 grand Disney revisionist animation, read books, rejected stupid men and powered herself into her destiny by walking into the Beast's castle and loving him. The furniture at the Beast's castle, the crockery, the cutlery, were turned into a powerful cast of cameos and made for much robust music. Belle came to be known by her yellow gown. It was nicey-nice, but still quite bearable.
But oh! The latest Disney Beauty and the Beast!
Animation may have lost some of its magic, for the central characters are played by human actors - a wooden Emma Watson plays Belle. The rest is a throwback to the earlier Disney version. But the burden of niceness!
The film is overlaid with every politically correct theme: gender justice, of course, as before, and homosexuality, and race. And then poor little motherless Belle time-travels with the Beast to France - Bourbon era? Or was the prince a degenerate Rococo rockstar? - to find that she had lost her mother to the Plague. It is just as well that the duo does not revise the French Revolution.
Reinterpretation is fine but when there is "A tale as old as time" at hand, why decorate it with niceties? It is undermining the story.
Yet there is hope. Beauty, much older, will survive Disney. A great poet prophesied so.
In his eighth letter "to a young poet", Rilke says this - and do forgive him for not revising, but skewing the gender question: "How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
Hope springs eternal. That is what fairy tales are about. Beauty is in the Beast.
Chandrima S. Bhattacharya
