Beauty and the Beast (2014)

Christophe Gans approaches the oldest story in the French cupboard with the reverence of a man restoring a cathedral. His Beauty and the Beast is a thirty-five million euro exercise in velvet and candlelight, and it tells the tale almost exactly as Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve left it. A bankrupt merchant. A debt to a gangster named Perducas. Two spoiled daughters demanding silks, one good daughter asking only for a rose. The materialism gets a gentle scuffing, since the sisters' greed and the merchant's ruin set the plot in motion, but the film has no interest in pressing the point. It is furniture. Pretty furniture.

Lea Seydoux's Belle volunteers for her father's captivity, which is the fairy tale's own arithmetic and not a manifesto. She spends much of the runtime being looked at and admired, and the film never grants her an interior life beyond patience. The romance rests on the ancient proposition that affection can grow where revulsion once lived, which is the inner-beauty mechanism as it has always operated. We are asked to love the beast for his soul. The film extends no such invitation to anyone else's body. The woodland mythology, a Nymph of the Forest and her vengeful father, gives the curse a leafy backdrop, though it works as folklore and spectacle, not as an environmental argument.

The result is a lavish, oddly inert pageant that has been reviewed more harshly than it deserves and praised more warmly than it earns. It preaches nothing. It represents no one in particular. Its cast is European and pale, its themes are courtship and forgiveness, and its moral instruction goes no further than the usual note about seeing past a hideous face. For the classification desk, this is a clean specimen. A traditional romantic fantasy, made in 2014, behaving exactly as a traditional romantic fantasy should. The fatigue sets in early, and it does not lift.