CINEMA: Trevor Steele-Taylor
WALERIAN BOROWCZYK’S infamous erotic fable The Beast (La Bete), made in 1975, is one of those curiously carnal works the French are so adept at.
Echoes of the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille and Joris Karl Huysmans rub shoulders with the music of Domenico Scarlatti, the bestiary of Jean de la Fontaine and the visual elegance of Bouggereau.
Beauty and the Beast, King Kong and the nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb are all alluded to in this mythical story of a woman and a beast.
A young American girl (Lisbeth Hummell) is brought to a crumbling French chateau to marry the son and heir (Guy Trejan). Dark and mysterious secrets exist here, though, about the sexual congress of the Countess de Ballo (Sirpa Lane) and an inhabitant of the dark forest a century ago.
Clues to the secret abound — “I overcame the beast”, the countess writes in reminiscence. The nature of this overcoming has the beast being washed in the blood of the lamb — and the Countess literally awash in the semen of the beast.
Borowczyk, who began his filmic career in Poland as an animator, moved to France in 1969. His forays into eroticism were marked by a fetishistic detail that no other film-makers have ever matched.
Often collaborating with the French author Andre Pierre de Mandriagues, Borowczyk’s films include Immoral Tales (which stars Paloma Picasso as the blood-drinking Countess Bathory), Behind Convent Walls (after Stendhal), The Art of Love (courtesy of Ovid), and, after Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss Osborne.
The Beast is a remarkable and libidinous work which, however “pornographic” its imagery, is constantly beautiful to watch.
Although still technically banned, the film has been allowed limited screenings at the Seven Arts in Norwood during May.