The legend [dramatized in La Belle et la Bête] is handled in a variety of styles. The home life of Belle's family is parodied and is often broadly farcical in tone (as, for instance, in the use of cackling ducks to accompany the shots of Belle's two sisters). By contrast, the departure of Belle for the Beast's castle and her entry there are stylised, Cocteau employing slow motion photography to obtain a dreamlike effect. The fairytale world of the Beast's castle is given great solidity for Cocteau aimed at giving a "realism of the unreal" and it is arguable that in fact the setting has been given too much weight: there is a degree of ponderousness about the film which Georges Auric's music serves only to emphasise. In evoking the magical qualities of the castle Cocteau has made strangely little use of the film's trick shot possibilities; the living faces of the statuary and the disembodied human arms that act as the Beast's servants are essentially theatrical devices. One of the great difficulties facing Cocteau was that of making the oversimplified and unpersonalised figures of a fairytale into characters capable of sustaining interest in a film lasting some ninety minutes. The solution found for the minor characters was caricature and an often humorous approach. As far as the two principal characters are concerned, the make-up of … the Beast emphasises his bestial nature in a number of ways, as do such scenes as that of the Beast drinking and that where he scents game. But Belle remains a rather dull figure…. The film does, however, constantly open up odd perspectives—particularly through the ambiguities of Belle's attitude to the Beast…. (pp. 59-60)

[Les Parents Terribles] is a tragi-comedy of tangled family relationships, filled with melodramatic confrontations, incorporating deliberately shocking elements (incest and suicide) and a plot of vaudeville complexity. Cocteau has himself admirably defined his objectives in this film: "I had set out to do three things: firstly, record the acting of an incomparable cast; secondly, walk among them and look them straight in the face, instead of contemplating them at a distance on the stage; thirdly, peep through the keyhole and catch my wild beasts unawares with my tele-lens." (pp. 60-1)

Realising that his characters are monsters, inconceivable outside the closed walls of their apartment, Cocteau has limited himself to just two settings—the family home and Madeleine's flat. The combination of close-ups and non-naturalistic acting emphasises the intense theatricality which is so essential to the work. The exact sequence of speeches (with only a few tiny cuts) and the three act structure are also preserved from the play and nothing is done to make the plot more realistic. The film opens with a shot of a curtain rising to reveal the actors, and the plot follows a highly artificial pattern, opening and closing in the family apartment, beginning with a fake suicide and ending with a real one, and containing a succession of dramatic revelations and "coups de théâtre". (p. 61)

Orphée is a film set apart from the works of its time and inevitably its production involved numerous difficulties. It is an intensely personal work and its creator has described it as the orchestration of a theme which twenty years before, in Le Sang d'un Poète, he had played with one finger. The poet Orphée reflects Cocteau himself in many ways, adored by the public and hated by his fellow poets, even being admonished with the words: "Etonnez-Nous." Cocteau claims to have avoided symbolism and as with Resnais's L'Année Dernière à Marienbad it is doubtless naive to seek too exact an interpretation. The film embodies Cocteau's personal mythology and conception of the poet as an exceptional being who has a unique and intimate relationship with death. Eternally self-preoccupied, Cocteau regarded the myth of Orpheus as his myth, for he felt himself to be a man with one foot in life and the other in death. For him the conflict of life and death is not a contrast of light and darkness but a matter of degrees of greyness and twilight merging into one another. The boundaries between the two are never drawn with exactitude—the Princess comes to watch Orphée asleep and the poet moves from this world to the next without pain or anguish. For a work dealing so largely with death Orphée is remarkably idyllic in tone. There is no sense of terror here, for death is a beautiful princess who can return the poet's love. There is no sign of physical struggle or decay, for Orphée remains handsome in death and his love for the Princess is never expressed on a physical level. Nor has death any irrevocability or awesomeness: the dead can be revived and the servants of death are often bungling and inefficient.

It is on the level of its mythology that Orphée must be judged. In his handling of the film medium Cocteau remains an amateur in the best sense of the word. The film is not without its defects: the transitions of mood are not always adequately handled (the farcical comedy of Eurydice's return from the Zone sits oddly in the film), the integration of Aglaonice and the Bacchantes into the modernisation of the myth is poor, and the whole handling of Eurydice's pregnancy is very weak in its use of dialogue clichés and facile symbolism. But despite these blemishes Orphée is a most remarkable and independent work…. (p. 63)

[La Testament d'Orphée] is in many ways a summing up of [Cocteau's] whole career…. [He reveals in this film] to the greatest extent his delight in the conjuring possibilities of the cinema, the ability to move freely through time and space, or to perform (by means of reverse projection) such impossible feats as making a picture appear by rubbing it out or reassembling a shattered flower or creating a photograph from the flames. While the mythology of the film is sometimes obscure, there is no mistaking the poet's serenity and good nature, here emphasised by his own slightly awkward performance. (pp. 64-5)

Characteristic of Jean Cocteau's work, in the film and in the theatre, is the fusion of contrasting, even opposing elements. We find in his films a unique combination of the real and the unreal, seriousness and farce, personal obsession and antique myth. One of the reasons why Cocteau succeeded in creating an acceptable and absorbing fantasy world was his ability to make myth and reality intermingle. (p. 66)

Contrast and change are the recurring features of Cocteau's films. Never is one allowed to adopt a single way of looking or remain in one mood. In La Belle et la Bête, for instance, he adds farce and beauty, tragedy and trickery to the original ingredients of bestiality and love. Cocteau followed the same principle in his treatment of the music Georges Auric has composed for his films. He rejects the conventional approach: "Nothing seems to me more vulgar than musical synchronisation in films. It is a further pleonasm…. The only synchronisation that I like is accidental synchronisation, the effectiveness of which has been proved to me by innumerable examples." (p. 67)

It is doubtless futile to attempt a rational interpretation of the symbolism in Cocteau's films. His whole approach defies logical analysis and much of his imagery is based on personal symbolism and private associations. This is a closed world to which one must surrender totally or not at all. If one is not to regard his whole work as a mere charade one must accept Cocteau's conception of the poet as a supreme being, living outside time and in proximity to death. To be moved one must accept too Cocteau's eternal self-preoccupation and his idyllic conception of life. Though death is the central theme of all his major films there is no sense of conflict or suffering…. Death in Cocteau's world has no finality: the poet in Le Sang d'un Poète commits suicide twice, Orphée is returned to life and humdrum happiness after being shot, Cocteau in Le Testament d'Orphée is raised from the dead after being slain by Minerva. All this is possible because the world of Cocteau is that of the dream. He has spoken of the importance of dreams in his life: "I begin to live intensely only when asleep and dreaming. My dreams are detailed and terribly realistic." Cocteau's films, for all their unevenness and reticence, are the cinema's most sustained attempt at capturing the reality of this unreal world. (pp. 67-8)