Beautiful. “Beauty” was filmed by Delvaux at the zenith of directorial fame, after outstanding artistic achievements “One Night on the Train” and “Date at Bray”. However, this tape, built on a small fantastic assumption and associative editing juxtapositions in a number of scenes, is more an unsuccessful imitation of Buñuel than another expression of the bizarre Delvaux universe.
The only thing that “Beauty” has in common with its other films is feminolatry, praise and worship of the idealized female image, perceived as the source of the mystery of existence. Cloquet’s camera work, coupled with sublime, disharmonious music, turns wonderful Belgian landscapes into vivid pictures that radiate symbolism.
Delvo can make a simple pictorial series exquisitely mysterious, turn a realistic narrative due to a few illogical details into a surreal fantasy. In this picture, there is an imbalance between everyday sketches of the life of intellectuals and semantically encrypted meetings of the main character with a mysterious stranger.
Having made the main character of the literary critic, a specialist in Renaissance poetry, the director seems to want to prepare him for a meeting with the female archetype, the revived Muse. Without a doubt, the conceptual content of the film was influenced by R. Graves’ book The White Goddess, which seeks to isolate the constant in ancient myths, gradually turning into real litany to Woman.
“Beauty” presents us with the discovery of this archetype as a subterranean generator of poetic imagination almost straightforwardly, in some ways even abstractly: a heroine who speaks another language, as if woven from the air of the vast Belgian fields, is the same as a cavalier who possesses all the characteristics of a caveman (he appears even in some kind of bear skin), manifesting muscularity.
In an effort to make the clash of refined intellectuality and undisguised sexuality a structural element of the film, Delvo deprives images of any specifics, emptys characters, creating a difficult to fill semantic vacuum. Characters are not in development, but in statics, frozen like mannequins, puppets in the play of the director’s imagination, and no graphic grace can compensate for the speculative coldness of dramaturgy in general and each of its elements in particular.
Using the associative montage common in intellectual cinema (popularized by A. René), Delvaux manages to raise small details to the level of multi-valued symbols, but it turns out this is not always successful, sometimes bombastic and not without snobbery. In general, the film demonstrates a serious discord in Delvaux’s work, which he is not always able to overcome, between serious claims to philosophicality and very limited cinematographic opportunities to achieve it.
In an effort to develop his film language, close rather to painting than temporal arts (and cinema, according to Bakhtin’s classification, refers to them), the director does not always realize that the statement should be as simple and clear as possible, albeit executed with poetic virtuosity, that one should not mask semantic uncertainty with sophisticated formal techniques, otherwise the film turns out to be unjustifiably pretentious, which is confirmed by the example of Beauty.