While often familiar with the Disney animation, few viewers are aware of Beauty and the Beast’s film influence. The actual folktale that we are familiar with as children and adults was first recorded by Madame Villeneuve in France in the mid-18^th century. Its modern incarnation was written and directed by the French artist, Jean Cocteau. It remains to this day one of the definitive film renditions of the story.

La Belle et la Bête was produced when France was still reeling from the world war. According to Cocteau, the only thing harder to come by than undamaged film was clean, unpatched bedsheets. “Shoe-string” didn’t even begin to describe the budget. It’s therefore surprising that despite these limitations, the film still holds up over sixty years later. Much of this can be attributed to the surrealist techniques of Cocteau, who pushed the medium to its limits.

The story remains relatively faithful to Villeneuve’s version: a merchant (Marcel André) hard on his luck goes to town in high hopes of profit from his ships only to leave empty-handed. On his return home, he gets caught up in a storm and ends up on the doorstep of a wealthy estate owner. Although the owner is no where to be found, the merchant finds a table prepared for him with food and wine. Eventually, the long day and food gets the better of him and he drifts to sleep.

After waking up the next morning, the merchant prepares to leave only to remember that he promised his daughters gifts. Unwilling to take any valuables from the mansion, the merchant decides to pluck a rose for his youngest: Belle (Josette Day). This act incites the rage of the owner of the estate: the Beast (Jean Marais). In exchange for his life, the merchant offers one of his daughters to the Beast. Only one daughter is willing to go: Belle.

Initially repulsed by the Beast, Belle slowly comes to accept and care about him. She begs him to let her see her father once more. The Beast relents, although he warns her that if she doesn’t return, he will die. Upon her return, one of Belle’s former suitors, Avenant (Jean Marais, again) decides to hunt the Beast down to “save” her from it. The two characters being played by the same actor is no coincidence.

When Disney made the animated film, he neutered a number of key elements in the original story in favor a traditional morality and romance tale. Cocteau, however, retains some of the more uncomfortable facets of what proves to be less of a children’s bedtime story than a psychological parable about sex relations.

Historically kept in the dark about sex, women often had a difficult time coming to terms with the demands of a wedding night. Many, understandably, saw male behavior as bestial. In saying, “Love can make a man into a beast and a beast into a man,” Cocteau notes that Avenant’s desire for Belle brings the monster out of him while the Beast’s love for her softens his heart. It’s perhaps a commentary on the dual nature of men when Jean Marais’ characters transform into each other in the end.

The is another element in La Belle et la Bête that is distinctly Cocteau: the temple to Diana on the Beast’s estate. At first it seems odd that he would include Roman mythology into a French fairytale. Yet those that remember the myth of Diana will recall that she was the goddess of beasts and the hunt, shunning all male contact. One day when a Prince named Actaeon spied on Diana bathing, she turned him into a stag and set his own dogs upon him. Suddenly the shots of mauled deer and the countless dog statues in the film make more sense. Cocteau accurately observed that the elements of the Beauty and Beast tale date back much further than we usually think.

The reason why the film still resonates to this day is partly due to the director’s experimental techniques. Cocteau was fascinated by time and the effects that film had on it. There are a number of home videos made by Cocteau that experiment with filming people performing an action backwards and then playing the film itself backwards to make them appear to accomplish impossible tasks in forward-motion. The scene with the candelabras held by disembodied arms lighting one by one as Belle’s father walks along the hallway was done by reversing the candlebras being blown out one-by-one as Marcel André walked backwards.

The Criterion edition of the film has been digitally restored and has alternative audio tracks that include an opera written by Phillip Glass that is timed to the original movie. The quality of the music updates Cocteau’s film a great deal. La Belle et la Bête is essential viewing to anyone who thought the Disney film was great as a kid.

There’s a hint of spring in the air. This is the observation of a grizzled worker in a pub as he watches a young couple meet and agree upon a date. The weather outside is typical of Stockholm during this time of year: cold and overcast. But that eternal cycle of seasons is following its course and it begins with Harry (Lars Ekborg) and Monika (Harriet Andersson).

The two teenagers come from poor, working class families. Monika has a large family with annoying younger siblings. Harry has a father who is rarely seen. Both share a hatred for their jobs.

When Monika suggests that they run off to travel, Harry laughs it off — initially. But as the monotony and distaste for their lives begin to worsen, the idea becomes tempting enough that the two lovers decide to make a run for it on Harry’s boat. They pass through the bleak waterways of the city and escape to the islands of the Stockholm archipelago.

Life is idyllic. Rolling clouds pass over a seemingly endless sea of shimmering water. They pass the time living simply and enjoying the freedom from their former constraints. Their love affair is as innocent as the life they escaped to.

The summer soon comes to an end. As the skies become slate grey and the sea swells and hurls against the beach, Monika discovers that she’s pregnant. Food becomes scarce. They finally decide that it’s time to return and start a life for the child.

In the scene after Monika is nearly caught stealing food from a local family, Harry holds her and tells her that they have been dreaming themselves. The question in both of their eyes is whether their bond can survive the reality that they have to wake up to.

With a harsh winter approaching, the couple must come to terms with a world that they, much like the parents that they left, cannot control. In the end, only one of them is willing to.

Summer with Monika is one of Ingmar Bergman’s earlier films. It’s a stark, contemporary portrayal of idealistic love and the challenges it faces when the pressures of life are too great for the illusion to be kept up. There are few cases of “happily ever after” in life and Bergman’s films often reflect this. The fleeting moments of bliss in a hard, demanding existence can only be sustained in memory. In one of the most powerful fade-ins in film history, Harry stares into the window of a shop with his child in his arms and for a moment relives the summer. As the memory concludes, he watches the ever-shrinking silhouette of their boat cross the sea back to Stockholm and fade into the pupil of his eye.

Bergman’s film predated the French New Wave movement and the era of free love in America by almost a decade. Its honest love scenes between two teenagers was quickly condemned by conservative moralists. In a telling example of the emotional maturity of American studios in the 1950s, Summer with Monika was licensed, cut down to a half-hour, and retitled to Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl to make it more palatable to the American public. Whatever realism and ethics the film had was removed in order to change it into an exploitive B-movie with a title that fit the ignorance of the times.

There was no judgment behind Bergman’s lens. The story illustrates the flaws and mistakes of a couple too young to know the demands of love–a theme that is as old as humanity itself, reflected in the seasons that we are born into and inevitably die from.