Crossing the frontier of fifty years, with the image of death before him and with war on his heels, Jean Cocteau has concluded that "comedy is already well advanced." The difficulty of being is the reckoning that Cocteau does with himself, with the self that was in the age of social splendor and with the self that is in the anxieties of the present. The author of The Blood of a Poet writes The Difficulty of Being While Rolling Beauty and the Beast. At the charm of that jewel of cinema, the past emerges from a sea of ​​shadows to end up giving birth to a unique memoir, where moral reflections are combined with literary ones, and both with the evocation of characters –Apollinaire , Max Jacob, Jean Genet and many others - from the world of art and literature. Sometimes - in the case of Marcel Proust and Nijinsky - it would seem that Cocteau makes us see through the keyhole, without thereby dampening the climate of self-absorbed drama that surrounds the work, and shows us a Little-known Cocteau, who deals with pain, friendship and death, frivolity and the government of the soul, as if he were writing his De profundis.