STUDIO: Altered Innocence | DIRECTOR: Kuba Mikurda
RELEASE DATE: Aug. 21, 2020
SPECS: NR | 72 min. | DocumentaryRATINGS (out of 5 dishes): Movie
Animator, iconoclast, provocateur, pervert.
Polish-born filmmaker Walerien Borowczyk, who passed away at the age of 82 in 2006, was called all of those things and more throughout his career.
The just-released 2018 documentary Love Express. The Strange Case of Walerien Borowczyk examines the life and films of Borowczyk, who seems to have never made a film that was not called “pornographic” while being typically hated and revered at the same time.
The film, co-produced by HBO’s European division, is told chronologically, tracing Borowczyk’s journey from the formative early days in his homeland and in Paris, where he was an artist and poster designer who evolved into the director of acclaimed surreal animated films that now appear Lynchian in style, leading to his established career pushing the envelope in such Seventies films as The Story of Sin, Immoral Tales, The Beast, Behind Convent Walls and Blanche.
Heard from in Love Express are admirers such as directors Terry Gilliam, who discusses the similarities of the filmmaker’s animated output to those of his own on Monty Python’s Flying Circus; Interview with a Vampire director Neil Jordan; Poland’s late Andrzej Wajda (Korczak), who appears in archival footage; Bertrand Bonello (Zombi Child); and Patrice Leconte (Dogora – Ouvrons les yeux). Adding further insight into the director’s often disturbing and erotic work are philosopher Slavoj Zizek, actress Lisbeth Hummel, cinematographer and regular collaborator Noël Véry and film critics Mark Cousins and Peter Bradshaw.
Borowczyk’s film clips on view here–ample but somewhat abbreviated–are used to exemplify the commentators’ observations and get to the crux of his motives and consistent desire to be totally free when creating his works. For the most part, we’re told, he got his way with unsettling themes and images, especially when it came to 1975’s The Beast, his take on the classic Beauty and the Beast tale. Segments from the film offered here underline what many viewers screamed as the director taking things too far in his depiction of a romance between a young woman and a creature (depicted here as a rat-like monstrosity with a huge penis). There is also an interesting sequence in which the costume of the film’s titular terror is taken out of storage and examined.
After given pretty much all the freedom he desired to make the type of films he wanted to, we’re shown how Borowczyk attempted a more commercial route with one his last films, the English-language Emmanuelle 5 starring Monique Gabrielle. It led to a terrible experience for the filmmaker and it ended up featuring footage he didn’t film but that was added while the movie was extensively reedited before its 1987 release.
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