The Beast (18.)
Directed by Walerian Borowczyk.
Starring Guy Trejan, Lisbeth Hummels, Sirpa Lane, Pierre Benedetti, Marcel Dalio and Elisabeth Kaza. French with subtitles. 98 mins.
Borowczyk's most notorious film is a mixture of Bunuel, Hammer Horror, the kind of erotic movie one used to browse through German satelitte channels looking for late at night and a phallic-centric episode of The Banana Splits. In a fading, dusty, run down French country house, the Marquis (Trejan) is eagerly planning for the nuptials of his dimwitted son Mathurin (Benedetti) to an English rose Lucy (Hummels.) The completion of the union will see the happy couple inherit her father's considerable fortune, but what is the dark secret that the house is hiding?
This is a film of two halves. The first is relatively restrained, a study of bourgeoise frustation and hipocrisy that takes some fairly cheap shots at aristocracy, establishment and all the standard 70s target. For instance the local priest is always accompanied by a couple of young boys that he is overly fond of. You assume the film is set somewhere in the nineteenth century until a car and a Plaroid camera appear to reveal it to be set in the present day, or rather the 1975 version of the present day.
Around the hour mark the film casts aside it rstraints and just runs amok, with all the represessed desires of the first half let loose. (Considering the care and attention that is spent setting up the plot it is galling how little is resolved in the second half.) Though Mathurin looks like a halfwit who was raised in a barn, Lucy can't wait for her marriage to happen. Her fervour is such that she dreams/ fantasices about Romilda (Lane) a woman who claimed to have been ravaged by a beast in the wood 200 years earlier whose story she had read earlier. The beast is a carefully edited man in a bear suit with a penis that perpetually resembles a just popped champagne bottle.
The cast is rather good, especially Trejan as the Marquis. If this were a Bunuel film he'd be Michel Piccoli; if it were a Hammer film he'd be Christopher Lee figure, suave and sophisticated yet thorughly evil. Danish actress Hummels makes for an uncannily convincing English rose.
That's the movie, but how does it rate as filth? Well, in the opening scene you are confronted with an erect penis and a vagina - both belong to horses. The rampant young nags get it on straight away but overall this is a film where human copulation is largely doomed to be frustrated. There is much yearning but limited consumation. As a result the bedposts and bedframes get a most fearful hammering.
There is a close up of Hummel's backside in a see-through dress with a crack of light shining through the gap between her legs for a moment that is really quite beautiful, even rather innocent. It also uses the cliched woman running through a wood and all her clothes getting stuck on branches and thorns and being ripped from her as the beast chases her through the woods which is well done. As a piece of out-there, lurid smut it is plenty enjoyable but it is a film about bestiliality and even if the bestiality is with a man in a customized bear suit, that does take the fun out of it just a bit.
Directed by Walerian Borowczyk.
Starring Guy Trejan, Lisbeth Hummels, Sirpa Lane, Pierre Benedetti, Marcel Dalio and Elisabeth Kaza. French with subtitles. 98 mins.
Borowczyk's most notorious film is a mixture of Bunuel, Hammer Horror, the kind of erotic movie one used to browse through German satelitte channels looking for late at night and a phallic-centric episode of The Banana Splits. In a fading, dusty, run down French country house, the Marquis (Trejan) is eagerly planning for the nuptials of his dimwitted son Mathurin (Benedetti) to an English rose Lucy (Hummels.) The completion of the union will see the happy couple inherit her father's considerable fortune, but what is the dark secret that the house is hiding?
This is a film of two halves. The first is relatively restrained, a study of bourgeoise frustation and hipocrisy that takes some fairly cheap shots at aristocracy, establishment and all the standard 70s target. For instance the local priest is always accompanied by a couple of young boys that he is overly fond of. You assume the film is set somewhere in the nineteenth century until a car and a Plaroid camera appear to reveal it to be set in the present day, or rather the 1975 version of the present day.
Around the hour mark the film casts aside it rstraints and just runs amok, with all the represessed desires of the first half let loose. (Considering the care and attention that is spent setting up the plot it is galling how little is resolved in the second half.) Though Mathurin looks like a halfwit who was raised in a barn, Lucy can't wait for her marriage to happen. Her fervour is such that she dreams/ fantasices about Romilda (Lane) a woman who claimed to have been ravaged by a beast in the wood 200 years earlier whose story she had read earlier. The beast is a carefully edited man in a bear suit with a penis that perpetually resembles a just popped champagne bottle.
The cast is rather good, especially Trejan as the Marquis. If this were a Bunuel film he'd be Michel Piccoli; if it were a Hammer film he'd be Christopher Lee figure, suave and sophisticated yet thorughly evil. Danish actress Hummels makes for an uncannily convincing English rose.
That's the movie, but how does it rate as filth? Well, in the opening scene you are confronted with an erect penis and a vagina - both belong to horses. The rampant young nags get it on straight away but overall this is a film where human copulation is largely doomed to be frustrated. There is much yearning but limited consumation. As a result the bedposts and bedframes get a most fearful hammering.
There is a close up of Hummel's backside in a see-through dress with a crack of light shining through the gap between her legs for a moment that is really quite beautiful, even rather innocent. It also uses the cliched woman running through a wood and all her clothes getting stuck on branches and thorns and being ripped from her as the beast chases her through the woods which is well done. As a piece of out-there, lurid smut it is plenty enjoyable but it is a film about bestiliality and even if the bestiality is with a man in a customized bear suit, that does take the fun out of it just a bit.
