I've certainly enjoyed other Eastern European fairy tale/fantasy films, so this came as a little bit of a disappointment. It's got all the lush visual invention of others you might have seen (if on a somewhat reduced production scale), but there's really nothing else going on, not much narrative drive or chemistry between the characters/actors.
It starts out promisingly enough as a more folk-horror-ish take on the familiar tale, but as soon as the vapid heroine is in the "beast's" lair as his willing captive, any imagination outside production design and photography ceases. She's vanilla-sweet, he's sorta scary but trying not to scare her...nothing happens, we just wait an hour for the inevitable transformation to occur. You'd think this would be leavened somewhat by glimpses of the homelife left behind, but that too is unimaginative--the heroine's sisters are just Cinderella's stepsisters, vain and trivial, caricatures too monotonous to be entertaining.
Apart from the film's atypically gloomy look (the "beast's" castle is much more damp and decrepit than usual), it just doesn't bring any fresh perspective, dramatic urgency, or much else to a familiar story told in bare-bones style. The beast's look IS a little odd (in that he's halfway between Cocteau's vision and a "bird man," not unlike the guy in Vadim's stupid "Night Games" a couple years later), but that's not enough to make much difference.
It starts out promisingly enough as a more folk-horror-ish take on the familiar tale, but as soon as the vapid heroine is in the "beast's" lair as his willing captive, any imagination outside production design and photography ceases. She's vanilla-sweet, he's sorta scary but trying not to scare her...nothing happens, we just wait an hour for the inevitable transformation to occur. You'd think this would be leavened somewhat by glimpses of the homelife left behind, but that too is unimaginative--the heroine's sisters are just Cinderella's stepsisters, vain and trivial, caricatures too monotonous to be entertaining.
Apart from the film's atypically gloomy look (the "beast's" castle is much more damp and decrepit than usual), it just doesn't bring any fresh perspective, dramatic urgency, or much else to a familiar story told in bare-bones style. The beast's look IS a little odd (in that he's halfway between Cocteau's vision and a "bird man," not unlike the guy in Vadim's stupid "Night Games" a couple years later), but that's not enough to make much difference.