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Immoral Women
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Between Art and Porn
I well remember the days when Walerian Borowczyk’s A Story of Sin (1975, aka The Story of Sin) went straight from the
Melbourne Film Festival to a season at the Longford (an arthouse), and his Blanche (1971), likewise, screened at
the Rivoli. That was the Borowczyk who entranced a “cultivated” audience – a
tasteful, tactful, sensitive filmmaker who beyond a few sudden, split-second
shocks, was content to suggest the sexual through a wash of veils, colours,
disembodied gestures.
By 1980, Borowczyk had utterly – and, it seems, wilfully
– alienated the arty crowd that had hitherto faithfully supported his work. He
was, apparently, now into soft-core porn. Yesteryear’s tasteful approach was
stripped away, and the rough edges (occasionally indifferent acting,
deliberately incoherent or disorienting editing) – aspects that had always been
present – forced themselves into the tawdry, sordid foreground.
If you wanted to see these Borowczyk films of the
later ‘70s – in fact distributed more widely than ever before! – you had to
brave the wilds of cinemas with names like The Blue Bijou: live strip show
included. And, since I am under the impression that I’m the only film critic in
Melbourne who sat through Behind Convent
Walls (1977) in such a disreputable spot and is willing to admit it, I feel
obliged to nudge Borowczyk, porn and all, back into the cinematic conversation
– and to celebrate his marvellous Immoral
Women.
One looming matter needs to be met head-on. For the current neglect of Borowczyk is not only indicative of a change in his work, but also symptomatic of the force and influence of feminist film criticism and theory. There can be little doubt that a certain feminist discourse circa 1980, even if it bothered with Borowczyk (I am aware of no pertinent example), would castigate him as irremediably sexist and patriarchal – purveyor of a grubbily voyeuristic cinema that puts women on display and exploits them for the sake of projected male fantasies, even as it pretends to represent female experience and desire (in the manner of a Just Jaeckin or David Hamilton).
I would not deny that the heritage upon which
Borowczyk draws – a largely European tradition of hedonism, Epicureanism and
the single-minded pursuit of sensual pleasure in art and daily life – is deeply
bound up with the history of repression of female sexuality, and the
concomitant valorisation of “the phallus”. Yet, for all that, it’s a richer,
more open and flexible heritage than some critiques grant or allow for. To
begin with, certainly in Borowczyk’s case, there is the intersection with the
revolutionary tenets of classic Surrealism …
Put it this way: the erotic effect of a Borowczyk film – that intangible current of flow and desire between screen and spectator – is not (it would seem to me) absolutely determined by rigid social and patriarchal definitions of male and female response. Don’t women get off on these films, too? (Perhaps not in the darkened rows at The Blue Bijou, but that’s a different order of problem.) With a militantly moralistic – sometimes even prudish – sector of feminist theory weighing in on pornography and erotica, it’s a question worth considering. [2023 PS: In the four decades following this review, many women have indeed declared, in numerous media, their love and appreciation of Borowczyk’s cinema. See this, for instance.]
So, my Immoral Women. It presents a sequence of three tales (the second adapted from André Pieyre de Mandiargues, author of The Girl on a Motorcycle, and a recurring source for Borowczyk) devoted to women who are (according to the French title) less immoral than evil – but evil, especially when performed by women, is a complicated thing in the Boro universe: sometimes rousing and triumphant, sometimes cold and chilling, sometimes both at once. The starring players are Marina Pierro (Margherita), Gaëlle Legrand (Marceline) and Pascale Christophe (Marie); situations depicted range from art making and animal eating to contemporary terrorism; death figures prominently in every episode. [2023 note: for an excellent, detailed reading of the film from 2005, see Scott Murray, “Walerian Borowczyk’s Heroines of Desire”.]
If there is one thing that especially characterises
Borowczyk’s work, it is that sexuality – as per Michel Foucault’s pathbreaking
historical analysis – is not pre-given, neither a basic human essence nor a
simple, physical act. Rather, it is something constructed in the very business
of creating, producing, speaking about it (what Foucault calls, in an expanded
sense, the realm of discourse).
Particularly in Immoral
Women’s first episode – it strikes me as the finest work Borowczyk has yet
done – scenes of lovemaking serve, above all, to trigger a playful chain of
affects and associations: in the cluttered décor, in the decentred,
freewheeling editing, even in the storyline itself, which appears to proceed by
a free association that is both Freudian and surreal.
Desire, for a Borowczyk character such as (in the first episode) the artist Raffaello (Francois Guétary), always leads to the production of new spaces, new objects, new combinations – from the paintings he makes of his beloved model Margherita to the enormous, elaborate fortress which his benefactors build for him: a fabulous collection of trap doors, secret corridors, rooms for the purposes of play … a less Kafkaesque version of the type of architectural fantasia unleashed in Borowczyk’s breakthrough feature, Goto, Island of Love (1968 – Raymond Durgnat’s 1976 essay on this and the director’s earlier work in animation is well worth seeking out, as is this subsequent program note).
For Borowczyk as an artist-filmmaker, what matters is
not so much the specific content of his narratives as the very process of
spinning a tale, pushing it to the most delirious heights of melodrama (always
with a fine comedy-of-the-Absurd touch), moving in a frenzy from initial
tranquillity to paroxysms of sex and violence (as in the second tale). It’s at
this level that charges of sexism against Immoral
Women become completely insubstantial, because it doesn’t much matter what
is actually there (in terms of depicted representation) on screen. The
eroticism is in the drive, the play, the will of the film as it whips itself into being – and takes us as spectators
along the path of this desire that knows no gender or sex-orientation
distinctions.
Immoral Women reverses the
trajectory of Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales (1973), which traced a line in its episodes from the youth-culture present back
into the medieval past, or away from an era of supposed reason and clarity and
then deep into dark ages. This time, he takes us through to the present, in
order to emphasise the profound continuity between his “evil heroines” – the Vogue-like bourgeois wife (Marie) of the
third story finally revealing the kinship with her historical sisters by
disposing of the hubby and revelling in perverse desire (see it for yourself to
discover the delicious plot details).
But if Borowczyk is a “historical filmmaker”, he is so
only in the freest sense. He does not pretend to convey the past objectively;
shamelessly, he stages and extends the traces and representations of that past:
the paintings and anecdotes, the isolated, discontinuous “museum” objects (Boro
was quite a collector of the most unusual antiques). His is a history open to
multiplicity, contradiction, speculation – a signifying practice overtaken by
the same desire that devours (while speaking of) sexuality and art.
Borowczyk, it seems, offends just about every taste
these days. He is neither realist nor surrealist, neither Great Artist nor
grand pornographer. He is between,
shifting; and in this solitary no-place that he has sought out for himself and
his work, he thinks, acts and creates. Who among us will – or can – receive
him?
MORE Borowczyk: Love Rites, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne © Adrian Martin April 1981 |
