{"id":4933,"date":"2014-09-24T10:18:32","date_gmt":"2014-09-24T09:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/?p=4933"},"modified":"2014-09-27T05:37:37","modified_gmt":"2014-09-27T04:37:37","slug":"immoral-tales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2014\/09\/24\/immoral-tales\/","title":{"rendered":"Immoral Tales"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Immoral<\/a>
Immoral Tales<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

\nCamera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection<\/a>

\nFormat:<\/B> Blu-ray

\nRelease date:<\/B> 8 September 2014

\nDistributor:<\/B> Arrow Academy

\nDirector:<\/B> Walerian Borowczyk

\nWriter:<\/B> Andr\u00e9 Pieyre de Mandiargues

\nCast:<\/B> Fabrice Luchini, Lise Danvers, Charlotte Alexandra, Paloma Picasso, Florence Bellamy

\nOriginal title:<\/B> Contes immoraux<\/i>

\nFrance 1974

\n103 mins\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Walerian Borowczyk\u2019s art\/filth portmanteau film consists of four stories. Set in the modern world, on a barren pebble beach \u2018La Mar\u00e9e\u2019 (\u2018The Tide\u2019) has Fabrice Luchini as a 20-year-old boy using his seniority to impose his desires on his 16-year-old cousin (Lise Danvers).<\/p>\n

Set in 1890, \u2018Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Philosophe\u2019 has Charlotte Alexandra as a pious girl, locked in her room, who gets all hot and bothered by the stations of the cross (and a mucky illustrated tract), before falling victim to a malicious vagrant.<\/p>\n

The third episode is a staging of the Erzsebet Bathory legend, as Paloma Picasso rides into a Hungarian village and rounds up all the suitably pulchritudinous females for a ritualised sequence of bathing, frock ripping and eventual slaughter. She bathes in their blood before making love to her female squire, who then betrays her to the King\u2019s men. <\/p>\n

\u2018Lucrezia Borgia\u2019 is a carnival of power, corruption and hypocrisy as Lucrezia (Florence Bellamy), the Pope, and various holy lackeys indulge in cackling murder and blasphemous three-way fornication, while a preacher who denounces their regime is burnt at the stake for his troubles.<\/p>\n

Plotwise, we are in a brutal and troubling world here, where the urge to power and the sexual drive are hopelessly entwined; where authority is corrupt and murderous and innocence or righteousness are doomed. There\u2019s a Sadean delight in perversity, an emphasis on anti-clericalism and a delight in the blasphemous. This being a Borowczyk film, though, it\u2019s all incredibly seductive, a sensual world of white lace, creamy marble and peachy flesh where everything is sexualised. The carefully chosen objects decorating his sets and locations are there to be stroked, fondled and played with; the elaborate costumes are there to be elaborately removed. Dialogue is sparse, the visual takes precedence. It\u2019s gorgeous, feeling at times like we\u2019ve wandered into a Brueghel, or Dutch master painting.<\/p>\n

Immoral Tales<\/i> brings Pasolini\u2019s Sal\u00f2<\/i> (1975) to mind on more than one occasion, but while that film is hellish, cold and ultimately depressing, Borowczyk\u2019s is just that bit more playful \u2013 you can sense a knowing smile playing around his lips as the outrage hits home. Sexuality in his films is overwhelming and dangerous and often twisted, but it\u2019s also natural and human and obviously a source of immense pleasure. He often intercuts his scenes of carnality with on-looking animals and uncaring nature, as if they are sitting in judgement, wondering how we let something so simple get so fucked up.<\/p>\n

Immoral Tales<\/i> had a convoluted release history. The episodes were made over 1973-4, and an unfinished version played at the London Film festival in 1974. This disc includes the longer French edit, including another episode, \u2018 La B\u00eate\u2019 (\u2018The Beast\u2019). This was the version that won the L\u2019Age d\u2019Or award (as judged by Max Ernst, among others) and became a box office hit, before it was removed and expanded to become its own feature film La B\u00eate<\/i><\/a> in 1976. I\u2019m grateful for the episodes\u2019s inclusion here because it\u2019s probably my favourite of the Tales<\/i>: a virginal 18th-century French woman breaks off from playing the harpsichord to follow a straying lamb into the woods, whereupon she is chased and ravaged by a beast, a huge brown-eyed bear-like creature with a seemingly permanent, jism-dripping erection*. Her sexuality awakened, she throws off her corset and proceeds to hump the exhausted creature to death. She then tenderly covers its body with dry leaves, grabs what remains of her clothing and returns to civilisation. This is, I realise, pretty much indefensible from any sexual\/political point of view, but as a piece of uninhibited Freudian fantasy cinema it takes some beating. Borowczyk\u2019s Tales<\/i> all work on this level, troubling wet dreams emerging from his id. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure how well they would function as straight pornography, how much use the raincoat brigade would have for cutaways of a snail crawling over a silk shoe, or all that choral and keyboard music. And while the tales are clearly meant to provoke, they simply don\u2019t follow the exploitation playbook. The Bathory and Borgia episodes are notably coy about onscreen violence considering their blood-soaked possibilities. An animator and a supremely visual stylist, the Borowczyk of Immoral Tales<\/i> is akin to a sensationalist Bu\u00f1uel , an old-school surrealist with a one-track mind. <\/p>\n

Special features include Private Collection<\/i>, an odd, amusing short in which a man, his head never in shot, displays to us his extensive collection of historical smut: prints, projections, dildos and mechanical toys. There are a couple of informative featurettes, the aforementioned L\u2019Age d\u2019Or award cut of the film, and a trailer. All in all, a fine package for an essential piece of weird cinema.<\/p>\n

Mark Stafford<\/B><\/I><\/p>\n

*As arthouse lust monsters go, it\u2019s up there with Isabelle Adjani\u2019s tentacled lover in Zulawski\u2019s Possession<\/i><\/a> (1981). Incidentally, a young Adjani was to be cast in \u2018La Mar\u00e9e\u2019, which would have been her first film, before she got cold feet.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A fine Blu-ray release for Borowczyk\u2019s arthouse smut anthology, in which power and desire are explored in four visually sumptuous episodes.
\nReview by Mark Stafford<\/B><\/I><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,3],"tags":[1027,775,856,145,1026,156,1028,880],"class_list":["post-4933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-check-it-out","category-dvds-and-blu-rays","tag-70s-erotica","tag-erotic-cinema","tag-exploitation","tag-french-cinema","tag-immoral-tales","tag-polish-cinema","tag-the-beast","tag-walerian-borowczyk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","wps_subtitle":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/purUP-1hz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4449,"url":"https:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2014\/05\/22\/who-is-walerian-borowczyk\/","url_meta":{"origin":4933,"position":0},"title":"Who Is Walerian Borowczyk?","author":"VirginieSelavy","date":"May 22, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"As part of our exploration of the ground-breaking Polish director, we look at his career as a board game. 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