Immoral Tales (1973) Art, History and Sex Cinema in the hands of Borowczyk (Review)

Since one of the stated aims of Arrow’s Walerian Borowczyk collection has been to rescue his reputation from an association with pornography, it seems strange to say that including two of the late-period erotic films is a masterstroke.  And yet it is.  Viewed in context, Immoral Tales and its supporting short A Private Collection are utterly characteristic of Borowczyk’s work; painstakingly crafted personal universes about the clash between innocence and experience, sensuality and corrupt authority.  This running theme, which exists in the PG-certificate Blanche as much as it does in any of the explicit films, is just one of the aspects of his work which makes his later work seem less aberrant and more inevitable.  Borowczyk’s animation-trained editing style, which makes great use of cutaways and inserts, as well as the affectless, deadpan performance style he favoured, all fit as comfortably into an arthouse film like Goto, Isle of Love as they do a pornographic film.

Although… In a written introduction, Daniel Bird excerpts a wonderfully outraged review of a work-in-progress cut from a 1973 issue of The New Statesman, then notes that Borowczyk rejected the idea of Immoral Tales as a “pornographic” or even “erotic” film.  What, then, was his motivation?  A moment in the final short of this anthology, ‘Lucrezia Borgia’, might hold the key, as the title character and her incestuous father (the Pope, no less!) scandalise an uptight Count with explicit drawings of animals mating.  Borowczyk was out for mischief with this film, an impression furthered by the inclusion of an alternative cut of A Private Collection.  Intended solely to appall the audience at the Oberhausen Film Festival, it is so explicit that some sections are blacked out to comply with Britain’s Dangerous Pictures Act (thankfully the only instance of censorship in the whole boxed set).

Furthering this impression is the fact that Immoral Tales was produced not by Hugh Hefner or Bob Guccione, but by Anatole Dauman, tireless promoter of Left Bank art films and collaborator with Resnais, Godard and Bresson, among others.  Dauman had seen how the liberalisation of French censorship had created a massive market for erotica and wanted to use this as a Trojan horse to slip the work of a great artist into the mainstream.  Had Godard not been in exile from narrative cinema during the early 1970s, he could have done it (the films he made on return, such as Slow Motion and First Name: Carmen, are strikingly explicit), but the task instead fell to Borowczyk, who raided all of his considerable knowledge of art history for this project.  The third short, ‘Elizabeth Bathory’, draws on the erotic work Ingres and Courbet produced for the Turkish patron Halil Șerif Pasha, and strengthens its art-world links by casting Paloma Picasso, daughter of Pablo, in the title role.  (On release in America, adverts for the film winningly proclaimed “You Don’t Have to Go to a Museum to See an X-Rated Picasso”!)

The choice of the real-life historical figure Bathory, the so-called “Countess Dracula”, indicates that Immoral Tales will not be a comfortable watch, and the bath of real pig’s blood Picasso is immersed slowly in at the short’s conclusion is truly repulsive.  Immoral Tales is not a film like Peter Strickland’s recent ’70s erotica homage The Duke of Burgundy, which aimed to elevate and interrogate the tropes of this era in sex cinema.  Perhaps an exercise like Strickland’s film is only possible in retrospect, whereas Borowczyk was a contemporary of, not a commentator on, the likes of Emmanuelle and The Story of O.

As a result, the film’s male gaze is pervasive and unironic and its treatment of incest and sadism is disturbingly matter-of-fact.  But is Immoral Tales as immoral as its title suggests?  A clear moral project runs through Borowczyk’s work – albeit not a kind of morality many would recognise.  He believes, as a Surrealist should, that the destruction of taboos is a necessary process to get in touch with the inner self, and that hypocrisy is the ultimate sin.  This is stated most clearly in ‘Lucrezia Borgia’, which intercuts the heroine’s incestuous orgy with a ranting nonconformist preacher, appalled that the Borgias produce children.  Yes, priests had children before the Borgias, he acknowledges – but they at least pretended they were their nephews and nieces!  In essence, he is offended that the Borgias aren’t hypocrites.  Paired with Florence Bellamy’s sunny, winning performance as a very carefree Lucrezia, it’s easy to sympathise with them over their critics.

Immoral Tales has a very strong cast, and if Boro couldn’t secure his first choice of Isabelle Adjani for the opening short (The Tide), he did at least secure one future star of French cinema.  A youthful Fabrice Luchini, looking exactly like Jesse Eisenberg, plays a man who manipulates his younger cousin into performing oral sex on him.  Adapted from the work of André Pieyre de Mandiargues, who also stars in A Private Collection, The Tide’s queasy morality could be read as a product of the Surrealist fascination with unapologetic cruelty – except Luchini plays the narrator as quite haughty and pretentious, and his co-star Lise Danvers is so unruffled by his demands that you suspect she’s not the virginal naif he fantasises about.  By the time ‘Elizabeth Bathory’ opens with a title card praising the kind and virtuous Countess, Borowczyk’s ironic intentions are clear.  The restrained acting style that sometimes sat oddly in the period romance of Blanche now appears more fully integrated into the film’s design, and the morality of the piece flips around so continually that it’s hard to tell whether the ending of ‘Elizabeth Bathory’ is happy or sad.

The second short is perhaps the best, and the one which shows Borowczyk’s ideology at its most unambiguous.  The title of ‘Thérése Philosophe’ is taken from an anonymous eighteenth-century pornographic novel which, like Borowczyk’s short, explored the erotic imagination in captivity and the link between sexual and religious ecstasy.  Yet the novel seemed to take delight in punishing its heroine, whereas the one act of sexual violence in ‘Thérése Philosophe’ is one Borowczyk finds unmistakably offensive, even turning his usually voyeuristic camera away as it happens.  It’s arguably the one act in the whole film that Borowczyk finds unmistakably evil – he certainly takes a grand guginol delight in Elizabeth Bathory’s murders, by comparison – and it’s counterpointed by a long scene of the title character alone in her room, masturbating to the booming voice of God in her head.

So in this film, Borowczyk has placed sensuality above man’s laws, put it on a par with art and now claimed it as a sacred duty.  That is, to be sure, a kind of morality, and even if it’s not one you agree with it’s hard not to be impressed by the cinematic and cultural literacy with which he builds the case, as well as the challenging, complex nature of the film itself.  The erotic genre would suit Borowczyk well during the mid-70s – he adapted de Mandiargues’ novel The Margin with Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristel, and fleshed out ‘The Beast of Gévaudan’, a rejected Immoral Tale, into his next feature film La Bête.  His later run-ins with the Emmanuelle franchise were less happy, of course, and his collage editing style would make it sadly easy for unscrupulous producers to include hardcore material against his wishes.  But on the evidence of Immoral Tales Borowczyk’s early dealings with erotic cinema were not a decline, nor even an unfortunate commercial necessity.  They were a flourishing, a way for him to bring all of the heterodox threads of his previous shorts and features into one astonishing Boro blow-out.

The extras, as ever, are tremendous.  Thanks to Daniel Bird’s previous documentaries I am able to recognise at least one of the ‘historic’ artefacts de Mandiargues handles in A Private Collection as Borowczyk’s own sculpture, and he continues his informative work with a thorough making-of and a reunion of several key crew members, in which we learn of several technical crew who refused to work on Immoral Tales for religious reasons.  Both cuts of A Private Collection are included, as well as a longer two-hour edit of the main feature that includes
‘The Beast of Gévaudan’.

Thanks for reading our review of Immoral Tales

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