Beauty and the Beast :
with Emma Watson as Belle, the elfin beauty from a humble French village whose poor old dad (Kevin Kline) is imprisoned by a wicked beast who lives in a remote castle. This is in fact a once handsome prince (played by Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens), transformed into a monster by an enchantress as a punishment for his selfishness, while all his simpering courtiers were turned into household appliances such as candles and clocks. Belle offers to be his prisoner in her father’s place. Gradually the grumpy, soppy old Beast falls in love with her and she with him.
Everyone warbles the classic 1991 showtunes by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman, and there is a sugar-rush outbreak of starry cameos at the very end, from A-listers who are given full status in the final curtain-call credits. The whole movie is lit in that fascinatingly artificial honeyglow light, and it runs smoothly on rails – the kind of rails that bring in and out the stage sets for the lucrative Broadway touring version.
Emma Watson: the feminist and the fairytale
This movie is allegedly updating its assumptions to include a gay character … while leaving the heterosexual politics untouched. Beastly ugliness is symbolic of tragic male loneliness even as the imprisoned pretty woman submissively redeems her captor’s suffering. The Shrek twist on this scenario has more of a sense of humour: the woman becomes ugly as well.
The gay character is Le Fou, played by Josh Gad — he is the nerdy sidekick to Belle’s caddish and malign suitor Gaston, amusingly played by Luke Evans. But Le Fou’s homosexuality is only definitively revealed as he pairs up with another man in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment at the final dance. Otherwise, his character is no different from the cringing sidekick in the 1991 version; whether Le Fou is the only or the most gay thing about the film is up for discussion, and it is the celebratory and witty connoisseurship of musical theatre in the gay community that has historically kept this genre vital. Emma Watson is a demure, doll-like Belle, almost a figure who has stepped off the top of a music box; she never gives in to extravagant emotion, or retreats into depression, but maintains a kind of even-tempered dignified romantic solitude. She doesn’t set the screen ablaze, but that isn’t quite the point: she is well cast and it is a good performance from her. There is an entertaining early moment when Belle is irresistibly drawn to wander out into the oddly Austrian-looking French countryside on wings of song, and does everything but spin around on the spot with arms outstretched.But the hills are alive with spells, and the poor Beast is miserable up in his crumbling castle. He is a bad-tempered old bachelor, yearning to be freed from his mask of ghastliness. (Weirdly, the movie reminded me of Jean-Pierre Melville’s movie The Silence of the Sea, in which the well-meaning francophile German officer, billeted with a French family during the Nazi occupation, earnestly suggests that they might yet find a kind of mutual regard, like the beauty and the beast.) It is a decent performance from Stevens, although as ever with this story, the moment when he is transformed back to handsome prince is a strange anticlimax. Somehow the handsome face is more boring and insubstantial than the great big animal face in which we’ve been encouraged to find something adorable. But it’s an efficient BATB, machine-tooled for sweetness, with flashes of fun, destined to be the centrepiece of a million teen sleepovers.
