Tale as Old as Time, With Video Projections The divided self assumes ravishing forms in "La Belle et la Bête," a show out of Montreal that is as lovely to look at as it is hard to listen to. Individuals split and multiply as if by enchanted atomic fission in Lemieux Pilon 4D Art's modern retelling of that eternal favorite of blind date recaps, "The Beauty and the Beast," which runs through Saturday at the Howard Gilman Opera House of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Consider, for example, how the disfigured title character (I mean the Beast, although it turns out our Beauty has deforming scars on her psyche) wrestles with the memory of his former, handsome self. The good-looking version of this shaggy creature leaps out of a mirror to do battle with the monster he's become, then evaporates, only to keep coming back for more. Or how about the way a young woman, a trust-fund princess in this version (and a bohemian painter), summons the chiding voice of her conventional sister, who appears as both an openly disapproving giant and a small, sticky-sweet gremlin of passive aggression? Then there's that middle-aged fairy godmother type who is so consumed by hatred that she generates a wall of flames that devour her. Would that Freudian analysts had the video technology so ingeniously deployed by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon, who create dimension-crossing fantasies seemingly out of the air. Then literal-minded patients would be able to rise from their doctors" couches and talk it out and duke it out with all their pesky inner demons. Mr. Lemieux and Mr. Pilon, whose other phantasmagorias include variations on Shakespeare's "Tempest" and the myth of Orpheus, would seem to be motivated by some such therapeutic intent here. This 90-minute production, part of the academy's Next Wave Festival, begins with a character identified as La Dame (Diane d'Aquila, in a black pantsuit and pearls, looking like Hillary Clinton at a formal dinner party), asking us, "In the mysterious story that is your life, who are you?" She goes on to point to a projection of Henry Fuseli's notorious 18th-century painting "The Nightmare," in which a succubus perches over a prone woman, and asks us with which character in that work we identify. My advice is don't listen to her, but instead watch how the figures in the painting, with subliminal menace, subtly shift their positions. For the rest of the show, you might want to stick to keeping your eyes open and your ears shut. You know the basic story, anyway, right? La Belle (Janine Thériault) goes to the castle of La Bête (Vincent Leclerc) and learns to love the attractive soul inside the fearsome exterior. In this version, for the record, our Beauty is a creator of viscerally disturbing artworks. And when she meets her Beast, she says excitedly, "I need to paint you." He answers, "You are nothing but a scavenger, a beautiful little scavenger." As you may have inferred, Pierre Yves Lemieux's arch, stilted script often sounds like a bodice ripper dressed up as poetry. It would probably come off better were it delivered in its original French with supertitles, which we could then read with furrowed brows while thinking, "Ah, leave it to les Français to say such things without sounding silly." The show's third major character is La Dame, the sorceress who made La Bête what he is today and who wants to keep the big guy to herself. The other characters are all impeccably realized video projections. And darned if they don't often seem more real than the flesh-and-blood figures beside them. When one of these eidolons, the Beast's inner self, sits down on Beauty's bed, I swear you can see the mattress sink with his weight. This "Belle" is unlikely to dislodge memories of Jean Cocteau's exquisite 1946 dream movie of the same title, but it has its own visual enchantments galore: an enigmatic white horse, saddled with nothing but symbolism; a forest of briers that keeps growing well beyond the fourth wall; a sexual tableau vivant featuring (surprise!) real human bodies that would warm the blood of any hard-core Pre-Raphaelite. With assistance from Mathieu St.-Arnaud (visual co-designer), Alain Lortie (lighting) and Anne-Séguin Poirier (set, costumes, accessories), Mr. Lemieux and Mr. Pilon have created the life-size equivalent of a fantasy video game, the kind in which you keep finding yourself in different virtual rooms where strange creatures deliver gnomic pronouncements. Of course with video games, you have the advantage of using the mute button. La Belle et la Bête By Pierre Yves Lemieux; translated by Maureen Labonté; directed by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon; original score by Michel Smith; sets, costumes and props by Anne-Séguin Poirier; lighting by Alain Lortie; visual design by Mr. Lemieux and Mr. Pilon with Mathieu St-Arnaud. A Lemieux Pilon 4D Art production, presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the BAM 2013 Next Wave Festival; Alan H. Fishman, chairman; Karen Brooks Hopkins, president; Joseph V. Melillo, executive producer. At the Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, near Ashland Place, Fort Greene; 718-636-4100, bam.org. Through Saturday. WITH: Janine Thériault (La Belle), Diane d'Aquila (La Dame), Vincent Leclerc (La Bête), Anne-Marie Cadieux (The Sister) and Peter James (The Demon).