(La véritable histoire de la bête du Gévaudan)—at the 1973 London Film Festival, where it created a
scandal. This from the editor of THE NEW STATES- MAN on the 30th of November: “What on earth does the British Film Institute think it is up to? On Satur- day and Sunday of last weekend, an unfinished film was on public show that seemed positively designed to do [morality campaigner] Mrs. [Mary] White- house’s work for her. It sent even the National Film Theatre’s normally unshockable audience shuffling out, shame-faced. Considering that, in its third and final section, the film featured only two characters—
a bear [sic] and a woman who engaged intermina- bly in sexual intercourse—it would have been startling if it had not. But what still astonishes me is that the film should have been included in the festival programme in the first place.”
“A Private Collection” would be released sepa- rately, while the completed five-episode version
would go on to win the 1974 Prix de l’Age d’Or, before Borowczyk decided to remove the “scandal- ous” story of the beast for its commercial release. The film opens with a quote from the 17th cen- tury French author François de la Rochefoucauld— “Love, with all its pleasure, becomes even more blissful through the way it is expressed”—which serves as an introduction to the first immoral tale, “The Tide.” This is based on a short story by André Pieyre de Mandiargues and contained in his 1971 collection MASCARETS. De Mandiargues had once created a scandal of his own with the novel L’ANGLAIS DÉCRIT DANS LE CHÂTEAU FERMÉ (US: THE PORTRAIT OF AN ENGLISHMAN IN HIS CHATEAU, 1953), initially signed with the pseud- onym Pierre Morion and banned for over 20 years in France. “The Tide” is the story of two cousins, Julie (Lise Danvers) and André (Fabrice Luchini), who share an unusual sexual experience on a rocky beach: André proposes that Julie fellate him until he climaxes at exactly the same time as the tide comes in.
While “The Tide” is a mysterious meditation on sexual enlightenment, “Thérèse Philosopher”
(Thérèse philosophe) makes an interesting com- panion piece to “A Private Collection.” A virtuous young girl, Thérèse (Charlotte Alexandra, later the star of Catherine Breillat’s A REAL YOUNG GIRL, 1976), is locked in a room by her angry mother for the “crime” of returning late from Mass. Upon her discovery of a book containing erotic photographs, she masturbates with a cucumber. An unlocked window offers another form of release, only for her to be assaulted in a field by an old tramp. What is most striking about this tale, apart from the dry humor of the piece, is how Borowczyk is able to
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instill a sense of the erotic into the most ordinary of objects (a doll, a painting, a cup and saucer, for instance). Borowczyk’s eye fills even the pipes of a church organ with sexual significance. The third and most fondly remembered story is “Erzsébet Báthory.” A 17th century Hungarian count- ess who believed that her youth could be maintained by bathing in the blood of virgins (hundreds of girls were tortured and murdered by Báthory and her accomplices), the “Bloody Countess” had previously appeared as a character in Peter Sasdy’s Hammer production COUNTESS DRACULA (1970), a some- what restrained mixture of history, horror and gen- erational conflict in which she was impressively played by Ingrid Pitt, and also Jorge Grau’s THE LEGEND OF BLOOD CASTLE (1972) with Lucia Bosé in the lead. She is also portrayed as a vam- pire in such films as Léon Klimovsky’s WEREWOLF SHADOW aka THE WEREWOLF VS. THE VAM- PIRE WOMAN (1970) with Patty Shepard, and Harry Kümel’s DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (1970), in which Delphine Seyrig memorably plays her as a Marlene Dietrich figure in silver lamé. Borowczyk’s film anticipates Pier Paolo Pasolini’s SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (1975) with its female vil- lage girls herded into the splendor of the Countess’ palace, where they are cleansed and groomed be- fore their inevitable slaughter. Like Pasolini, Borowczyk is well aware of how those in the most privileged and respected of positions are prey to the power plays of sexual sadism and brutality. Báthory (enigmatically portrayed by Pablo Picasso’s daugh- ter Paloma, in her only film role) engages in a les- bian relationship with her page (Pascale Christophe), a woman in disguise, who ultimately betrays her. The film looks particularly magnificent in 1080p: never has blood looked so red or so thirst-quench- ing, and Borowczyk’s camera visually caresses the endless parade of naked bodies in a manner that is genuinely erotic.
Borowczyk travels even further back in time for the fourth and final tale, “Lucrezia Borgia,” which focuses on the 15th century Italian (portrayed by Florence Bellamy) and her incestuous relationship with her father, Pope Alexander VI (played by the documentarian Mario Ruspoli, who signs himself “Jacopo Berenizi”) and her brother Cesare (Ruspoli’s son Fabrizio, as “Lorenzo Berenizi”). As visually sumptuous and erotically charged as the previous story, this segment also displays a playful sense of humor: the threesome results in a child who will no doubt continue the tradition, while the mad friar Girolamo Savonarola (Philippe Desboeuf) is dragged from the pulpit, still ranting about the dissolution of the Church.
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