In November 1973 Borowczyk previewed three of them, to be anthologised in his forthcoming Contes immoraux ( Immoral Tales, 1974), during the London Film Festival. Borowczyk promptly made several short films, each addressing a different sexual taboo. Anatole Dauman, who produced Borowczyk’s first French film, the superb short animation Les Astronautes ( Astronauts, 1959, co-signed by Chris Marker), put it to him that, given the 1970s’ relaxation of censorship laws (and with an eye to better box-office returns), he might like to try his hand at erotic cinema. The Beast‘s elegant, chateau-set mise en scène, its soundtrack, and even the very impetus for its production are all deeply beholden to this bizarre dream sequence’s profound irrepressibility. Not just its overripe narrative – a satirical, Buñuelian comedy of manners brimming over with pre-nuptial intrigue, wherein sinful family secrets compromise both a deformed noble simpleton’s wedding prospects and a corrupt Catholic church – but also its very fabric. The film containing this preposterous zoophilic sexual assault fantasia is interpenetrated by it in every respect. When she’s eventually caught, the creature ravishes her, and then she it – at length – and utilising a varied repertoire of pleasuring techniques, in effusive cum shot after cum shot. Most famously, it features a dream sequence which comes, in fits and starts, to impose itself upon a present-day master narrative, concerning a young 18 th century society woman (Sirpa Lane) who, abandoning her harpsichord practice in a quaint French garden pavilion to rescue a little lost lamb, piecemeal loses all her lavish feminine trappings – scarf, dress, petticoats, slippers, wig and corset – when unexpectedly becoming the quarry of a monstrously priapic, ursine creature in an extended, slapsticky, and brilliantly edited parkland chase sequence. It still startles even now, after 40 years, with its graphic – while Rabelaisian and altogether absurd – depictions of bestiality and rape, amidst abundant other explicit sexual goings-on between horses first, and later, human beings. 1 At the epicentre of this fall lay La Bête ( The Beast, 1975), long sniffily deemed to have harbinged the slide of a filmmaker of oft-proclaimed genius into a peddler of tawdry soft-core pornography.Ĭertainly, The Beast was massively scandalous, incurring the wrath of censors in many territories. Few more controversial figures have enlivened cinema than the Polish polymath Walerian Borowczyk far fewer still experienced so massive a fall from critical grace.
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