Immoral Tales: Borowczyk's Anthology of Art and Provocation

Walerian Borowczyk is the most respectable disreputable director in European cinema, and Immoral Tales (Contes immoraux, 1973) is the film where the two reputations collide hardest. A Polish animator revered by the art-house intelligentsia — Cocteau-adjacent, feted at festivals, a man who made short films that Terry Gilliam and the Brothers Quay would later cite as scripture — turned to feature-length erotica in the early 1970s and spent the rest of his career being quietly shelved under the wrong heading. Immoral Tales is the pivot. Watch it for the provocation and you will miss the point; watch it for the design and you find one of the most formally exact objects the erotic cinema of the decade produced.

An anthology built to run backwards

The film gathers four stand-alone vignettes, and the first thing to notice is their order, because it is doing quiet, deliberate work. Immoral Tales moves backwards through history. It opens with “The Tide” (La Marée), set in the present, in which a young man and his cousin are stranded on a beach and the rising sea imposes a strict, almost mathematical time limit on a seduction. Then it steps back to the eighteenth century for “Thérèse Philosophe”, a country girl locked in her room whose religious devotion and dawning desire braid together into a single delirium. Then back again to 1610 for “Erzsébet Báthory”, the Hungarian countess who bathes in the blood of village girls to preserve her youth, played by a strikingly cast Paloma Picasso. And finally to the turn of the sixteenth century for “Lucrezia Borgia”, a chamber piece of Renaissance corruption drawing the pope, his son and his daughter into one incestuous knot.

The reverse chronology is the film’s structural signature. Rather than progress towards enlightenment, Immoral Tales recedes towards the origins of transgression, as if arguing that appetite is the constant and history merely the changing costume it wears. Each tale is more stylised, more painterly and more archaic than the last, so the film seems to sink into the past the longer it runs. It is the kind of formal decision an animator makes — someone used to thinking of a work as a sequence of composed frames with a controlled trajectory — and it separates Immoral Tales immediately from the loose, anything-goes portmanteau films the era churned out.

There is also a fifth tale that got away. Borowczyk had planned a segment about a young woman’s encounter with a beast, cut it before release, and expanded it into his notorious 1975 feature La Bête (The Beast). Later home-video editions, including Arrow’s restoration, have reinstated a version of it, which means the anthology now exists in more than one running order — a nice complication for anyone who cares about how these things are assembled.

The animator’s eye

What holds the four disparate stories together is a way of looking. Borowczyk trained as a painter and made his name in animation, and he never stopped composing like both. His camera is fixated on surfaces and objects — fabric, fruit, jewellery, worn stone, a hand closing on a small thing — and he shoots them with the still, patient attention of a collector cataloguing a cabinet of curiosities. Bodies in Immoral Tales are framed the same way, as textures within a composition rather than as pornographic focal points, which is exactly why the film reads as art to some viewers and as evasion to others.

This is the “why it works” of the whole enterprise, and it is worth being precise about. Borowczyk slows everything down. He lets a scene breathe past the point of comfort, holds on a detail until it turns strange, and edits with the deliberation of a man placing objects on a shelf. The effect is hypnotic and faintly clinical at once — desire observed under glass. When it lands, as it does in the Báthory and Thérèse segments, the film achieves a genuine erotic-uncanny charge that almost nobody else was reaching for. When it misses, it can feel airless, an exquisite corpse posed for the camera. That unevenness is the honest verdict on the film: it is a design triumph with a variable pulse.

Paloma Picasso, in her only real screen role, is the anthology’s coup of casting. She is not a trained actress and Borowczyk does not ask her to be one; he uses her as a fixed, imperious presence, a face and a silhouette that the compositions arrange themselves around. The Báthory segment consequently plays less as drama than as a series of tableaux vivants, gorgeous and cold, and it is the part of the film most often lifted out and shown on its own.

Borowczyk had arrived at this point by an unlikely road. Before the features he made celebrated animated shorts — Renaissance, Les Jeux des anges, the feature-length Mr and Mrs Kabal’s Theatre — dense, morbid, hand-crafted works that put him among the most admired animators in Europe. His first live-action features, Goto, Isle of Love (1969) and Blanche (1971), carried that meticulous craft into a real, cruel world of locked rooms and doomed desire. Immoral Tales is the moment the eroticism moved from undertone to subject, and the reason his later reputation curdled: the same critics who had crowned the animator grew uneasy once the bodies arrived. Arrow’s Camera Obscura box set has done the slow work of putting the whole arc back in view, which is the right way to meet him — as one continuous sensibility that simply changed medium.

The Báthory thread

That segment is also the reason Immoral Tales belongs on a very specific shelf. Elizabeth Báthory — the “Blood Countess”, the sixteenth-century Hungarian noblewoman accused of murdering scores of girls, her legend forever entangled with the invented detail that she bathed in their blood to stay young — is one of the great migratory figures of genre cinema, and 1971 to 1973 was her moment. She turns up as a chic modern predator in Daughters of Darkness, where Delphine Seyrig’s Countess is a masterpiece of insinuation, and she is the barely disguised model for Hammer’s Countess Dracula, released the same season. Three films, three countries, one legend, all within a couple of years — which tells you the Báthory story was serving some collective nerve about beauty, ageing and aristocratic appetite that the early 1970s could not stop pressing on.

Borowczyk’s Báthory is the most static and painterly of the three, the one that treats her as an object of contemplation rather than a character with a plot. Set it beside Seyrig’s languid modern vampire and Ingrid Pitt’s doomed Hammer aristocrat and you have a perfect little triangulation of how a single piece of folklore refracts through three completely different sensibilities. That is the collector’s pleasure Immoral Tales offers most reliably.

Where it sits in the collection

The larger context is the strange 1970s project of making explicit material literate. Borowczyk approached it from the fine-art side, importing the seriousness of the gallery and the archive. The American who ran the parallel experiment from the film-culture side was Radley Metzger, whose glossy, witty, jet-set eroticism is charted in Radley Metzger, the auteur of elegant eros; the two men rarely get mentioned together, yet they were solving the same problem — how to make desire on screen carry the weight of high culture — from opposite continents and opposite trainings. For the wider map of how these films earned their place in film history, the sexploitation canon is the survey to read next.

There is one more useful neighbour. Borowczyk’s fixation on surface, colour and abstraction over narrative puts Immoral Tales in conversation with the pop-art delirium of Girl on a Motorcycle, another late-1960s-into-1970s European experiment where a former visual craftsman turned an erotic story into a study in image. Different temperaments entirely — one hot and psychedelic, one cool and archival — chasing the same idea, that the way a thing is looked at is the whole content of the film.

Spoilers below

Each tale carries its own small arc. “The Tide” is the most schematic: a young man instructs his cousin in desire against the literal countdown of the incoming sea, the tide functioning as both clock and metaphor, and the segment ends with the water reclaiming the beach and the interlude with it. “Thérèse Philosophe” builds to delirium — the girl, confined and feverish, fuses ecstasy and blasphemy until a wandering vagrant enters the story, and she departs her old life entirely, the segment closing on flight rather than punishment.

The Báthory tale follows the legend to its logical horror: the Countess presides over the gathering and slaughter of village girls and the ritual blood-bath that is meant to renew her, with Borowczyk staging the aftermath as a series of frozen, jewel-lit compositions and then folding in a note of betrayal from within her own household. “Lucrezia Borgia” closes the film at its most acid, drawing the Borgia family — Lucrezia, her brother Cesare and their father the pope — into a tableau of ecclesiastical corruption and incest, staged against the pieties of the Church so that the sacred and the profane share a single frame. The film ends there, at its deepest point in the past and its bleakest in tone, having travelled backwards through four centuries to arrive at the argument it was making all along: that the immorality is old, ornamental and entirely human, and that the camera’s job is simply to look at it steadily and refuse to flinch.