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Ma Belle

I wonder why I saw the two most important movies in my life so close to each other, when I was sixteen or seventeen, and why I have never seen another movie so great as those, and likely never will. I saw "Immortal Beloved" first -- which I could appreciate all the more playing the piano, and I fell in love with every aspect of that movie: it will never fade from my mind. The other movie "La Belle et le Bete" came later, introducing a shadowy world that has affected me forever -- it is excruciating to watch the commentaries today and see the actors, and the sets, and to know that it was all real, just as it is excruciating to think that Mary and Percy Shelley existed somewhere, and John William Waterhouse existed somewhere -- somewhere I wasn't.

The castle sequences were filmed in a dilapidated park in France that still seems obscure and un-noteworthy to anyone -- that it is festering in seclusion even now with those same lichen-covered statues is unthinkable to me -- and why I should not be there, even more so. Jean Marais did a lot of interviews about it and as always seems to be the case, the beastly characters are played by friendly, charming people -- he reminded me so much in his manner of David Selby or Lara Parker -- I guess it is the complacency that rests in past greatness. I do not know if I'll ever know the feeling because I don't think I will ever be great.

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