The Beast (La Bête)

This film's reputation for containing the most outrageous and bizarre sex scene in the history of cinema is well deserved. The scene in question is a dream sequence, shot two years before the rest of the film and initially intended as an entry in Borowczyk's Immoral Tales. On its own it is a piece of very rude, ribald humour, but the film Borowczyk wraps around it is a rather grim tale of family secrets and aristocratic corruption, revealing an intriguing contrast between male sexual shame and female sexual freedom.

The short is pretty incendiary. An 18th century maid searches for a lost lamb in the forest, only to find it dismembered by a terrifying hairy beast. The creature pursues her and begins to rape her, but the maid takes control and brings it to a climax, after which it expires from pleasure. She then buries the body and flees. The central erotic idea – that the woman begins to enjoy her rape by a hideous monster – is obviously a disturbing one. 

Which is why the story added on top of the short is an important bit of framing. The dream is no longer just presented as a simple product of Borowczyk's perversities – he gives it to a character. And that character is a woman – the rape fantasy becomes hers. It inspires her to repeatedly seek satisfaction from her ugly husband-to-be, only to be rebuffed. In taking control of her desires, she also mysteriously slays her own beast (although Borowczyk has some fun suggesting that this was an act of God and a punishment for bestiality).

The power dynamic therefore is an odd one. Male sexuality is presented in a traditional way as violent and dangerous, something women must either tame or get devoured by. However the modern beast is a timid, ugly, underdeveloped man, who is too nervous even to speak to his fiancée. She is the one who takes the initiative, and it is her sexuality that ultimately proves the most dangerous. As with The Story of Sin, Borozczyk is ultimately on the women's side. And in this film he provides them with a narrow escape from the gruesome clutches of the venal, hypocritical and downright gruesome patriarchy.

Immoral Tales

Borowczyk's four lewd, weird films don't really cohere without watching the introductory fifth. A Private Collection is just a catalogue of obscene objects, mostly of Borowczyk's own manufacture. In the enclosed space of a bourgeois flat dark secrets are revealed which underline the hypocrisy of the 'moral police'.

All very well as a tirade against censoring sex. But it's the sense of confinement that lingers. Borowczyk's eroticism is strangely sequestered and controlling. He beavers away at these films in the same way as he does his animations and props. It's a private universe in which he has the final say.

Thus we get a domineering youth who commands his cousin to fellate him while he lectures her on the movement of the tides. Then a girl besotted with the omniscient voice of God –  which provides sexual comfort in an environment of abuse. Then Elizabeth Báthory using her noble status to round up and butcher maidens so she can bathe in their blood. And finally Lucrezia Borgia led into the papal palace to be 'worshipped' by her father and brother.

Borowczyk is detail-orientated. He lovingly lingers over the objects that crowd his films, which is why A Private Collection is the apotheosis of his erotica – human flesh removed entirely. He is a set designer with a camera, a builder of entrancing but lifeless tableaus.

The Story of Sin

From the title down, this film is an ironic retelling of the Fall myth. It starts with Eva going to confession and being advised by the priest to remain humble and chaste when confronted with advances from admirers (inevitable apparently, given her beauty). Even the priest isn't immune, casting a longing glance as she walks away. The 1908 novel that supplies the story was serialised, making the plot rather loopy, but the climax comes two thirds of the way through when Eva is forced to tempt and kill an innocent man by two villains. As someone who enjoys his fair share of blasphemy, that restaging of Adam's temptation felt particularly succulent. At the end of the film, Eva atones for her crimes by saving her lover from the same two villains. She is martyred for that, although Christian symbolism is muted in that scene. The film certainly makes for uncomfortable viewing, but I think it's supposed to be.

This is my first encounter with Walerian Borowczyk. I've read that with this project he set out to make a melodramatic popular film, although the costume drama is spiked by frank scenes of nudity and a focus on the grim realities of life. Eva is destroyed by her hyper-romantic attachment to her first lover, a married man who vanishes (and appears to have forgotten her) for much of the film. Borowczyk's instincts on questions of class, gender and sexuality seem correct on an initial viewing, but then my DVD had a very interesting short clip of an interview with Grazyna Dlugolecka (the leading lady), who talked about the way Borowczyk treated his actors like marionettes and obsessed over the mise-en-scène. The sets are indeed beautiful, and great use is made of props (particularly photos and paintings) as scene-setters. However, the most harrowing sequence in the film is more impressionistic – handheld, lots of cuts and point-of-view shots – showing Eva killing her newborn baby. It was done entirely by the cinematographer Zygmunt Samosiuk, who may deserve quite a bit of credit not only for the look of the film, but for the excellent performances in it.