2014 was the year when the film going publics interest in
Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk[1]
was reawakened with a career retrospective Cinemas
of Desire: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk ran in May as part of the 12th
Kinoteka Polish Film Festival at the BFI in London. Also at the end of same
year Arrow released a new box set containing five of his feature films and a
collection of his short films. This set of films includes The Beast (La Bete) (1975) which I
blogged in January 2011 and Immoral Tales released two years
later in 1977.
Bringing to mind the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini especially
the feel, camera work and colouring of Salo o le 120 giornate di Sodoma
(1975) with a touch of British filmmaker Ken
Russell for good luck, Immoral Tales is an anthology film that includes four separate
erotic themed stories each from a different century, which involve the loss of
virginity, female masturbation, bloodlust and incest.
‘Love, with all its
pleasure, becomes even more blissful through the way it is expressed’[2]
The first story The
Tide is based on a story by Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues which begins with
the words ‘my cousin Julie (Lise Danvers) was 16, I was 20, this small age
difference made her susceptible to my authority’ The cousins ride to the local
beach on their bicycles where the female performs fellatio on her older cousin
to the sound of the incoming tide with its crashing waves and the songs of the sea birds circling
overhead.
 |
| The Tide. |
The second story Therese
Philosophe starts with the following statement ‘the people from our region
demand the beatification of Therese H a pious young girl shamelessly raped by a
vagrant. Goodness comes by conversing with those who are good. These are the
world of the Holy Ghost’. A teenage girl (Charlotte Alexandra) gets locked in
her room for dallying to long at the Church. While in the room her sexual
desires come to the fore and cucumbers are put to good use!
 |
| Therese Philosophe. |
The penultimate tale is Erzsebet
Bathory in which the Countess (Paloma Picasso[3]) accompanied
by her squire visits the villages and settlements of Nyitra County in Hungary
collecting virgins who she takes back to her castle. There they are herded into
cubicles to shower as part of a ritual that will lead to there death allowing
the Countess to bath in their blood to retain immortality.
 |
| Erzsebet Bathory. |
The final story, and probable the most erotic, is Lucrezia Borgia (Florence Bellamy) who
in 1498 accompanied by her husband Giovanni Sforza visits her Father Pope Alexander
VI and her brother Cesare Borgia and has sex with both. Meanwhile the Dominican
Hyeranimo Savonarola accuses the Church hierarchy of dissolution and is burnt
to death for his pains.
 |
| Lucrezia Borgia. |
This wonderful example of 70’s erotica dwells, as David
Thomson opines in his article in Sight and Sound,[4] on
nudity and sexual activity, observed unflinchingly and yet with the witty eye
of an artistic connoisseur, and stating that it was a challenge both to censors
and its arthouse audience. With its grand use of music[5] that
matches beautifully the visual screen image, wonderful cinematography by
regular contributor Noel Very (among others), composition and period detail and
a production by the great Anatole Daman, who has worked with the likes of
Godard, Bresson, Wenders, Resnais and Andrei Tarkovsky, we have a film which
should be seen and enjoyed by a modern audience to educate what real erotic
cinema and human sexuality looks and feels like and not rely on dull nonsense
like Forty Shades of Grey to titillate sexual taste buds!
[1] Walerian Borowczyk directed 40 films between 1946 and
1988 settling in Paris in 1959 where he died in 2006 aged 82.
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