The second feature in Arrow’s extensive restoration of Walerian Borowczyk’s work, Goto, Isle of Love is a live-action French film that cannot be anything other than the work of a Polish animator. Its venomous contempt for authority and its poker-faced sense of humour are both unmistakably Eastern European, and its visual grammar is somewhere between a very early silent film and a puppet show – sets deliberately lacking in-depth, with actors meticulously posed against them and shot head-on. More than one interviewee in Daniel Bird’s excellent making-of documentary The Concentration Universe (included as an extra here) say Borowczyk directed his actors as though he was arranging the paper cut-outs he used to animate.
That’s not a criticism; Goto, Isle of Love thrives on artifice and precision. Set on an imaginary archipelago that’s been reduced to an imaginary island after a series of natural disasters, Goto takes place during the reign of Emperor Goto III, played deliciously by Pierre Brasseur as a proud elderly lion of a man, his relaxed demeanour testament to a much more comfortable life than his desperate subjects.
The story begins with a chance meeting between one of those subjects and Glossia, Goto’s glamorous younger wife. The man becomes obsessed with Glossia, a fixation which Borowczyk communicates through joltingly edited flashbacks, but is unaware that as well as being married to the island dictator, she is also secretly in love with a handsome young soldier. This two-pronged situation unfolds into a story of subterfuge, voyeurism, and repression both sexual and political, replete with tense silences broken by terrific use of the music of Handel.
A two-storey guillotine, and a fly trap, the ingenious workings of which are the subject of one of the film’s most inexplicably entertaining scenes
GOTO, ISLE OF LOVE
If that sounds complex, it isn’t. The plot is more tightly constructed than Borowczyk’s only previous feature, Theatre of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal, but then it couldn’t possibly be any more loosely constructed than that series of madcap skits. Borowczyk’s passion is for the digressions – the bizarre details of life under Goto III, many of which involve the elaborate props that Boro made himself. These include a portrait that shows a different member of the Goto dynasty depending on where you’re looking at it from, a two-storey guillotine, and a fly trap, the ingenious workings of which are the subject of one of the film’s most inexplicably entertaining scenes.
The interviewees in The Concentration Universe recall Boro as a painstaking perfectionist, and that is much in evidence here. But his perfectionism is not at the expense of feeling. Glossia is played by Ligia Branice, Borowczyk’s wife, and in the scene where she takes a fraught beach holiday with her domineering husband you can see the same kind of compassion and tragedy that characterised Rosalie, the tremendous short he made with her two years before Goto.
Arrow’s supplemental material matches this passion. The artist Craigie Horsfield gives an introduction to the film in which he sounds quite overcome by his feelings towards this work, and Daniel Bird’s editing compliments it beautifully. When Horsfield suggests Borowczyk’s films up to and including Goto form a kind of closed-off universe, Bird responds with an astonishing montage of repeated motifs from the early features and short films to prove his point. There’s also an enjoyable film about Borowczyk’s sculptures, many of which could have fitted right into Goto’s world, and a deliriously cheesy vintage trailer which declares the film a masterpiece while making sure to include every moment of nudity the feature contains.
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