Truly inspired

It's wonderful to see this extraordinary film in such a good print, far better than the one I originally saw in the cinema. I was completely gripped - again.

This is a work where everything comes together as it might in a poem. The cinematography makes brilliant use of contrast, playing great menacing sweeps of blackness against gleaming light, just as the heightened theatrical style of acting plays sudden violent gestures and movements against stillness or light dancing movements or tensely stealthy ones in a way that is sometimes more like ballet than acting of more conventional kinds. The balletic quality is not there instead of straightforward acting though, but as well as it, lying alongside it and infused into it. The scenes between Beauty and the Beast are wonderfully soaked in conflicting emotions, some stated and some unspoken. The creation of the scene was inspired too, so detailed, so inventive, so involving in its combination of voluptuousness with an edge of danger, its suppressed violence and deep pathos, and its glimpses of radiance all echoing and amplifying the feelings expressed by the actors. Words like 'visionary' and 'spell-binding' are all too easy to use about films, but I really did feel they were deserved in this case.