Beauty and the Beast (La belle et la bête) 2014 film - It's So Gorgeous

It's nice to see a different interpretation of the Beauty and the Beast story that is not touched by Disney and it's not a musical. I do appreciate that this is a French movie production, which originally this fairy tale story came from the same region. 

The movie follows the same way as the original tale, Bell's father (André Dussollier) gets lost in the woods, discovers Beast's castle, steals a rose and makes a deal with the Beast (Vincent Cassel), in which he has to return to him the following day as a punishment and if he doesn't, well.. the Beast is going to kill his entire family: "A life for a rose." Bell (Léa Seydoux) volunteers to take her father's place and goes to meet the Beast... , you know how the story goes. 

The main thing why I wanted to watch this is for the aesthetics, which is so gorgeous! The beautiful landscape of overgrown gardens, the ruins of the Beast's castle, the costumes, I love the dresses! It has a dream-like atmosphere and a magical-fairytale, which is very fitting for a storybook theme.

As for the CGI, I didn't expect this movie to have Hollywood tier quality, but for what this movie is, it's actually not that bad. In fact, I actually prefer the French version of the Beast's design than the Disney's 2017 live-action movie. In Disney's version, it looks like they used the actor's face (they used motion-capture) and plastered it onto a CGI character. It looks so unnatural and weird. In the French movie, it looked like they used practical effects and a mix of CGI, which looks a lot more better.  

Unfortunately, this film focuses so much on making everything look pretty, it sacrificed a great deal of character and story development. Bell and the Beast's chemistry is very weak. I mean, they don't interact with each other that often. The big chunk of the movie, Bell spends most of her time wondering the castle, arguing with the Beast and sleeping. While in her sleep, she has dreams about the Beast's past life, before he was cursed and I actually like that they gave him a new backstory. But out of nowhere, Bell falls fast-in-love with him. It doesn't make any sense because they were fighting not too long ago and now they're all good. How..?

On top of that, the villain of the story isn't much better either. He is a bully who harasses Bell's family because one of her brothers owes him some gambling money He was an unnecessary roadblock that didn't add any value to the story. I think the Beast, alone, is enough of an antagonist. If his relationship with Bell were much more stronger, he could of learned to be more kinder, selfless and learn to take responsibility for his own actions. It's really too bad, I think the actors were all very good, but it felt completely wasted.

If Beauty and the Beast is your favorite fairy-tale story, I would still recommend at least giving this a try. I have no regrets watching this.  Actually, you can watch this movie (if it's still available) on tubitv.com, which is a free LEGAL streaming site. It has the dubbed version. I decided to purchase the movie because I prefer hearing it in the original language (It's french, I think it's a beautiful language). 

Trailer

 Released  2017
 Director  Christophe Gans
 Adaptation  1740's original story by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve
 Where  Tubi, YouTube