The Beast (1975) Boro’s eye-wateringly animalistic Beauty & the Beast (Review)

Before we turn our attention to the last disc of Arrow’s Blu-Ray Borowczyk restorations, let us take stock of the man’s career up to this point. A shoestring genius of experimental animation, “Boro” had proved his versatility with four massively different features; the crackpot animated comedy of Theatre of Mr. and Mrs. Kabal, the self-contained imaginative triumph of Goto, Isle of Love, the minor-key medieval tragedy Blanche and the outrageous, transgressive anthology feature Immoral Tales. His follow-up to Immoral Tales fleshes out a short originally produced for that feature but cut when Borowczyk and his producer Anatole Dauman felt the film was too long. On paper, that sounds like a safe choice, following up your first major hit with offcuts promising more of the same.

What actually resulted was the most controversial film of Borowczyk’s rarely uncontroversial career. The Beast is a film which makes good on Borowczyk’s insistence that he didn’t see himself as a pornographic film-maker; it contains a few moments which are clearly erotic, a few which are clearly completely unerotic, and an awful lot which seems designed purely to astonish and appall even the most jaded of porn-cinema habitues. Upon its arrival in Britain, the Directorate of Public Prosecutions were brought in to decide whether it could be considered legally obscene; the uncut version was not released on these shores until 2000.

The area of contention is what BBFC head James Ferman described at the time as “the most explicit treatment of bestiality we have ever had”. Yet Borowczyk also argues, as he did in his wonderful history-of-porn short A Private Collection, that there are really no new scandals. The plot of The Beast centres around a young woman marrying into a troubled aristocratic family; it is a classic piece of Gothic storytelling, with her arrival dredging up dark, animalistic secrets from the family’s past.

The film itself performs a similar function, finding analogues to its shocking story in the history of erotic art, in fairy tales (Beauty and the Beast), in literature (Lokis by Carmen author Prosper Mérimeé, on which the film’s plot is partly based) and in history. The original short from Immoral Tales, after all, was called The Beast of Gévaudan, after a real-life werewolf panic from 1760s France (also the inspiration for Christophe Gans’s Brotherhood of the Wolf).

The Beast is a hugely ambitious film. While his first two feature films took place either in a completely absurd universe, and his second two took place in something approaching the real world, The Beast blends levels of reality by incorporating the footage from Immoral Tales as a dream of the lead character, a dream which turns out to unlock the mysteries of the movie’s real world.

Borowczyk regular Noel Véry subtly alters his cinematography to emphasise this, with the dream sequence showcasing a less formal, more handheld approach to the rest of the film, and as the dream’s lead Sirpa Lane gives a funnier, campier performance than Lisbeth Hummel does in the main body of the film.

Hummel is unfortunately fairly awkward in this role, and in the extras, Véry reveals that she was cast at short notice to replace an American actress who dropped out at the last minute. Strangely, Hummel still performs the role in English, as though we’re not meant to notice her heavy Danish accent. It may be that by this stage the sheer extremity of Borowczyk’s scripts was limiting the quality of the cast who would work on them – a young Isabelle Adjani dropped out of the role eventually taken by Lise Danvers in Immoral Tales, after all. The shock material does sometimes distract the viewer from following Borowczyk’s plot, too, which is complex enough to have the heroine’s father’s best friend’s uncle as a major character.

Yet, once the shock wears off, the movie’s werewolf-like shifts in personality become a strength. In one stand-out scene, the constant high tensions in the family result in a volcanic communal loss of temper over dinner. He teases an explanation for the family’s fear of the forest’s sexy beasts with an interracial affair going on under their noses – and these snobbish, cruel, ossified characters certainly would regard such a thing as bestial behaviour. In the end, the solution to the mystery is both realistic and bizarre, and allows Borowczyk to get some more choice jabs at organised religion in as a bonus.

Appropriately for a director who loved both handmade props and the eccentric, The Beast feels like a cinematic wonder cabinet, hopping in-between tones, settings, styles and planes of existence, from the documentary mode showcased in the opening, eye-wateringly explicit footage of horses mating to the high comic-grotesque fantasy of Lane’s scenes. Of Arrow’s extras, all that needs to be said is that they are as thorough as usual, though special mention has to be made of the short video essay The Evolution of the Beast. It shows Borowczyk’s early design sketches for the central monster, revealing that his strong concern for creative editing was at work even before a frame of film was shot, and also includes his notes for a projected sequel. That film, Motherhood, would have been very different, and would perhaps have restored some of his reputation as a great Surrealist rather than just a pornographer. Thinking about that goal while looking back on this box set, all you can say is; better late than never.

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