The Beautiful Beast

La Belle Bête (2006), or The Beautiful Beast, is a French Canadian movie directed by Karim Hussain. It’s a tense family story with overtones of psychodrama, existentialism and chamber drama. It revolves around mother, Louise (Carole Laure), the son Patrice (Marc-André Grondin) and daughter Isabelle-Marie (Caroline Dhavernas). They live at the family farm in the country side, a huge place that looks like an old colonial estate complete with pillars and a fountain. The husband/father has died in a tragic accident which seems to have for ever ruined the family dynamic and broken something in Louise. She now showers her son with affection, something that seems a little off right from the beginning, and dislikes the daughter. There are brilliant little glimpses of the cruelty of the state of affairs right at the beginning when mother Louise tells her daughter that she is ugly when she laughs.

The story is based on a novel by Marie-Claire Blais, who was quite young at the time of writing, and there is something of the angry, overly-obvious teenager about the story. It isn’t subtle. Isabelle-Marie is, to my mind, the main character. She sees her family’s defects and tries to do something about them in her half-fauve way. Her reasoning is somewhat flawed and Dickensian, but then again that matches the whole situation. Patrice is described several times as being an animal, which I think should be interpreted in this particular situation as being without the power of reasoning and acting on need and want. The aging mother, Louise, seems to be mainly self-involved and afraid of losing her physical attributes. Isabelle-Marie navigates a difficult terrain between clarity of thought and cruelty.

From a cinematic point of view we are treated to a variety of shot styles, partly stagy fixed shots framing the actors in an almost painterly style and shaky hand-held camera for the more nervy scenes. As for psychology, it is pretty heavy handed which means if you’re not in the mood for that kind of thing it would be easy to dismiss as obvious and affected. It is a pretty typical underground movie and it is easy to assume it would do well at smaller film festivals.

Messed up families, incest, psychodrama and not so subtle symbolic action is what you get. For example, the beautiful Louise lives on her hyper-feminine grace and as the movie progresses that starts to decay. Literally. We are treated to the image of her at her vanity table, inspecting her own mirrored reflection and where as that starts as a pretty pleasant exorcise it becomes obvious that that is somehow the root of all her problems, something the author/director can’t help making over obvious by having her develop a facial sore that will not heal.

By and large the movie is well-worth watching despite it being a bit actorly and hyperbolic. The reason I draw the parallel to Dickens is because the character of Louise reminds me of Miss Havisham, especially her unfortunate end. And Isabelle-Marie and Patrice are largely under her power during the whole movie, despite trying to break away, or having to accept the circumstance.

I have one of those curious minds that like to pierce the veil so I generally like watching the “making of” specials and listening to the directors commentary and disturb the whole illusion of the movie as a coherent universe. I like all the behind the scenes stuff. Mostly. I will give a warning here, though – don’t use the directors commentary option on this one if you get it on DVD. It is drivel. I tried and had to turn it off because it felt too much like having a hyper-caffeinated fast-talking sales pitch overlaying the sound track. Sometimes it adds to the movie having actors, directors and art department talking about what they have created and sometimes it doesn’t. This is one of the times when it doesn’t.

Mule