Panna a netvor (Beauty and the Beast). 1978. Czechoslovakia. Directed by Juraj Herz. Screenplay by Herz and Ota Hofman, based on the story by František Hrubín. With Zdena Studenková, Vlastimil Harapes, Václav Voska. 35mm, courtesy Národní filmový archiv. In Czech; English subtitles. 91 min.
By 1978, Slovak director Juraj Herz had, for much of the decade, been compelled to make films far from the stylized, darkly expressionist register of his infamous The Cremator. But this dank, morbid version of the fairy tale, shot back to back with The Ninth Heart, was Herz’s return to that earlier mode. His Beast is a creature with a giant bird’s head, its feathers caked in decades of muck; his Beauty is the porcelain-skinned young daughter of a merchant who callously sacrifices her after going bankrupt. Herz’s approach is minimal but effective: Most of the film unfolds in the Beast’s severely dilapidated forest mansion, in handheld long shots accompanied by whispered voiceover and murmuring organ music, as dreams and reality flow into one another. Love in Herz’s vision is inherently fragile and full of yearning.