Walerian Borowczyk's Le Théâtre de monsieur et madame Kabal | Mr and Mrs Kabal's Theatre (1967)

Initially Borowczyk's first feature – an animated creation with usually strange metallic noises (rather than music) – this seems almost completely bewildering. And although it remains bewildering to some extent, in retrospect it takes on more significance. This is certainly an absurd world in which the principal figure – the fearsome Madame Kabal – is rubbed out a number of times by the illustrator, a representation of whom appears in order to introduce himself to the woman. But it would be difficult to speak of what we are seeing as being in any way a regular narrative: it's more of a long series of often shape-changing figures with no apparent reason for their metamorphosis: virtually nothing is constant, and possibly the large number of butterflies in the film – which of course undergo four changes in their life – is an indication of this change of life.

But there are also animals, which are unrecognisable as any in existence, with the possible exception of maggots. And there is much mechanical behaviour, even the suggestion of the making of bombs (this being the time of the Cold War). And then there's Monsieur Kabal.

M. Kabal is a minor figure in this in comparison with his wife: he makes fewer appearances in the film, and is much smaller in size, quite probably dominated by his wife. He also seems to be spending quite an extent of time looking through his binoculars to the world outside the drawn one, where short film clips show us the 'real' moving world in colour, frequently with scantily clad young women.

Walerian Borowczyk's Blanche (1971)

Walerian Borowczyk's Blanche is set in a convincingly medieval (thirteenth century) context with musical instruments of the time. The lord of the manor (Michel Simon) in his eighties and is married to a very young and beautiful woman played by Borowczyk's wife Ligia Branice as the Blanche of the title. And everyone falls in love with her, including (mutually) her stepson Nicolas (Lawrence Trimble) and the people visiting the castle, such as the king himself (Georges Wilson) and his page Bartoloméo (Jacques Perrin). Much blood will be spent, and not a great number of the protagonists will survive, apart from the king and the dove (which surely in some respects represents Blanche herself?).

This is said by many to be Borowczyk's best film, and I can believe it: a sumptuous feast.

Walerian Borowczyk's Goto, l'île d'amour | Goto, Island of Love (1969)

Goto, l'île d'amour is in a number of ways an ironic name for such a dystopian depiction of this island cut off from the rest of the world in 1887, which has changed very little technologically since then and is ruled by the tyrant Goto III (Pierre Brasseur).

Work is hard and the main relaxation the men seem to have is the state-ruled brothelsThose having committed a certain number of crimes have to fight it out with another offender, the winner being reprieved, the loser receiving the death sentence. Goto's wife is Glossia (Ligia Branice) – all inhabitants' first names begin with a hard G – and she has horse riding lessons with Lieutenant Gono (Jean-Pierre Andréani), with whom she soon begins an affair.

The huge fly in the ointment is the reprieved criminal Grozo (Guy Saint-Jean), who starts to slime his way up the rungs of Gotan society, largely by 'discovering' the body of Goto III, who appears to have killed himself but in fact has been murdered by the ex-criminal, who also convinces an elder that Gono is the killer, who is given the death sentence. And although Grozo is in love with Glossia and intends to marry her, when Glossia discovers Gono's fate she kills herself. This early feature – along with Borowczyk's previous short animated films – will set the seeds for his future erotic feature films.

Walerian Borowczyk's La Bête | The Beast (1974)

 

Loosely based on Prosper Mérimée's short story 'Lokis', this is far more coherent than Borowczyk's Contes immoraux, and arguably far more interesting. The American Philip Broadhurst bequeathes his estate to his daughter Lucy if she marries Mathurin (Pierre de l'Esperance's son), and is married by Cardinal Joseph do Balo. Mother and daughter make their way to the house.

We see Mathurin at the beginning of the film, watching a horse, in some detail, have sex with another. This sets the scene for the rest, and meanwhile Lucy is aroused by images of bestiality.

But although Pierre has tried to disguise the fact that Mathurin is an idiot, it becomes apparent from his table manners that something is seriously wrong. The wheelchair-bound Rammaendelo de Balo also lives in the house, and he's against the marriage as he depends on Mathurin to help him. As he attempts to dissuade the cardinal on the phone, Pierre slits his throat.

Lucy dreams of a rampant beast, wakes up and, suspicious, goes to Mathurin's room and finds him sleeping. She has another intense dream of the beast smearing his sperm over her and then dying. Lucy wakes up, goes to Mathurin's room again and finds him dead too. This is when it is discovered, on Mathurin's plaster cast on his arm breaking, that he has not a hand but a claw, that his body is thick with hair, and that he has a tail. Lucy and her mother escape.

I suppose you could call this a kind of softcore horror.

Walerian Borowczyk's Contes immoraux | Immoral Tales (1974)

In Contes immoraux Walerian Borowczyk looks at four aspects of sexuality, moving back in time. It begins with a quotation from La Rochefoucauld's Maximes: 'L'amour, tout agréable qu'il est, plaît encore plus par les manières dont il se montre que par lui-même.' 

The first section is called 'La Marée', is in the present time and is adapted from the screenwriter André Pieyre de Mandiargues's Mascarets: 'Julie, ma cousine, avait seize ans, j'en avais vingt, et cette petite différence d'âge la rendait docile à mes commandements.' After consulting the tides, André (Fabrice Luchini) cycles with Julie (Lise Danvers) to the coast, gets Julie to suck him and comes as the tide comes in: he claims it's to educate her.

The second section is 'Thérèse philosophe', set in July 1890. Following the loose theme of imprisonment in the film, Thérèse (Charlotte Alexandra) is locked in her room by her aunt after she is late from church. The title relates to a eighteenth-century book in the room (containing many plates illustrating various sex acts) about a young woman's sexual education, and Thérèse looks at it and has a wild, very noisy masturbatory fantasy in her room with a courgette. She later escapes and is raped by a tramp. The film announces that La Gazette du Dimanche published a piece stating that the people in the area asked for 'Thérèse H' to be beatified.

The third section was to be 'La véritable historie de la bête du Gévaudan', although Borowczyk changed his mind and decided to make that into a full-length feature. So Erzsebet Bathory is the third section. Báthory Erzsébet was a seventeenth-century Hungarian countess who has inspired many stories and legends. Here she (acted by Paloma Picasso) rounds up a number of sexually appealing young women from a peasant village,  they have a shower in her castle, and then there's a vague kind of orgy followed by her female 'page boy' Istvan (Pascale Christophe) killing them all and Bathory swimming in their blood to retain her youth. The police arrest her.

Finally, we have the notorious Lucrezia Borgia (Florence Bellamy) towards the end of the fifteenth century. She was the daughter of pope Alexander VI (Jacopo Berinizi) and the sister of Cesare (Cesar Berinizi). She has sex with both relatives, Savonarola rants and is carried off.

This is not one of Borowczyk's most acclaimed films, either by critics or the public.