IMMORAL WOMEN (1979)

Immoral Women is kind of a follow-up to Walerian Borowczyk's more famous Immoral Tales, in which the director presented five short stories with strong erotic elements. This time there are three stories and their common element is not really the heroines' immorality, as the English title implies, but rather their ability to triumph over the men who would dominate them. All three segments would probably be properly characterized as very dark comedies.

The erotic juxtaposition of humans and animals, often full-fledged bestiality, is a recurring theme in Walerian Borowczyk's work. In his most famous film, The Beast, a woman is raped by an undefined beast which seems to be somewhere between a biological gorilla and a mythological werewolf, and the film begins with a graphic portrayal of a stallion mounting a filly. The Immoral Women trilogy has two stories which feature Borowczyk's curious obsession with human/animal interaction. One takes place in contemporary Paris, the other in some undefined period in the 18th or 19th century.

The modern-day story is fairly routine and not particularly erotic. A rich woman is kidnapped and held for ransom. Her husband does not seem to feel any real urgency about getting her back, and the kidnapper decides to rape her while they wait for the husband to act. Her faithful dog, a large and vicious protector, finally tracks her down and manages to dispose of both the slimy husband and the pitiless kidnapper. The film ends with an embrace between the naked damsel in distress and her canine rescuer.  This story is tame and conventional by Borowczyk's standards and doesn't even include much nudity.

The animal-themed period piece is by far the most erotic and interesting of the three segments. Gaelle Legrand plays a teenager who seems to be acting younger than her age. Although her physical development is complete, she spends her days cuddling her pet rabbit Pinky, even using the bunny for various erotic practices. Her parents feels that she needs to be broken of her obsession with the rabbit, so they cruelly cook it for the family dinner, telling her that she is eating lamb when she is actually eating poor old Pinky. That seems fitting and symmetrical, since Pinky had been ... um ... eating her in a previous scene. When the insensitive parents finally confess Pinky's fate to their daughter, she does what I think any of us would do in her situation. She sneaks out of the house naked and has sex with the local butcher, thus giving the director a chance to juxtapose human sex with more living and dead animals. The brutal butcher takes her virginity on the straw of his animal pen, with the experience augmented by the bleating of sheep which had been awaiting slaughter. The rutting couple is also surrounded by stripped carcasses. Eventually, Gaelle tricks the witless butcher into killing himself, then uses his knives to slit the throats of her sleeping parents. She leaves behind enough evidence to make it seem that the butcher had killed her parents, then hung himself in shame. The story concludes with her in an orphanage, relating her tale to an eager bedtime audience of her peers.

The third tale, the only one without any implicit or explicit bestiality, tales place in Renaissance Italy and is a much more conventional story about a beautiful peasant woman who uses sex to manipulate a prosperous artist and a wealthy art patron into a situation where they are both dead and she is back in her village with chests full of their riches to share with her true love. This one is the most blatantly comical and plays out like a farce, right down to comical falls through trap doors, slapstick pokes in the eyeballs, and poison cakes swapped for real ones. As in the contemporary tale, there is not much female nudity, although plenty of naked males cavort around Raphael's studio. The narrative is not edited very well, but the segment is made watchable by a combination of humor, the exceptional facial beauty of Marina Pierro, and some surprisingly excellent production values for a film without a major studio budget.

Lovers of Eurotica will find this anthology well worth watching for two reasons:

First, the disc is a loving restoration of a film which has never been made available before in any acceptable version on any home medium. There has never been a DVD at all, and the video tapes were of inferior quality. This version has been fully restored from a negative, and is totally uncut and uncensored, thus representing a quantum leap from any version ever previously available to the public.

Second, the middle segment, featuring Gaelle Legrand and Pinky, is one of the classics of transgressive cinema, and ranks among Borowczyk's best achievements. This segment is so good that it makes up for any disappointment one might experience with the others. The darkly humorous plot is clever, if totally demented. The parents are comically cruel. The sick humor works fairly well. (I have to love the shot of Pinky's carcass hanging in the manor's window, with the fluffy skin hanging down below the stripped meat.) The photography is both artistic and technically competent.  The imagery is richly imagined. Gaelle's masturbation with the bunny is a classic erotic scene, strangely beautiful and slowly erotic, yet comical at the same time. The sex scene with the butcher is quite wild and spirited. In addition, Gaelle has a spectacular body and is completely naked for much of the segment's running time.

Ratings: On our scale, the segment with Gaelle and Pinky is a solid C+, a truly demented Eurotica classic. The Renaissance segment is a solid C. The contemporary segment is weak - either a D or a weak C-.

If you are interested, the Rare DVD guy is running another 2-for-1 sale on this DVD pre-order. Click here for details.

 

Film Clips:

• Gaelle Legrand - and the ever-popular (and apparently tasty) Pinky. (Zipped .wmv)

 

Collages:

Marina Pierro

Gaelle LeGrand

Pascale Christophe

THIRD PARTY VIDEOS

• I always say that Eight Days a Week has the best-ever wet t-shirt scene, but I could be persuaded to change my vote to this scene (zipped .avi) of Drew Barrymore in Gun Crazy

• Two from Masters of Horror - the Right to Die episode: Julia Anderson (zipped .avi) and Robyn Sydney (zipped .avi).

• Two of my favorite scenes of Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut. (Two .avis zipped together.)

• Sandra Bullock in the atrocious Fire on the Amazon, (Zipped .avi)

 

OTHER CRAP:

Catch the deluxe version of Other Crap in real time, with all the bells and whistles, here.

MOVIE REVIEWS:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

CIA Code Name: Alexa (1993)

This is an espionage thriller staring Lorenzo Lamas as a C. I. A. operative, and his real life wife Kathleen Kinmont as the super-agent working for the bad guys. The head of an embassy decides his path to fame and fortune lies in acquiring nuclear technology, so he identifies a secret government microchip that will give him just that, and arranges to steal it. His gang becomes trapped in the government building where they find the chip, and one of them swallows it, but is shot by Lorenzo Lamas. O.J. Simpson, as a local cop, gets his nose out of joint when, after he arrests Kinmont, she is taken by the feds.

OK, lets think about this a little bit. There will have to be some kick boxing here. Kinmont is obviously going to have to become the love interest to Lamas, which means Kinmont must be vulnerable in some way. Also, OJ will have to become part of the final showdown. That about covers the rest of it, except the identification of Kinmont's vulnerability, which ends up being a young daughter.

Yawn.

IMDb readers have this at 3.8. I don't understand how they can work up enough emotion to drop the score that low. It is neither remarkably good nor remarkably bad. It is a mostly predictable actioner with shoot-outs, fist fights, explosions and chases, a couple of strong female characters, and a happy ending. Joe Bob Briggs once awarded 3 stars, but that was before OJ became a dirty word.

This is a C-, as an adequate small-time actioner.

Kathleen Kinmont shows her left breast in a sex scene.

The SI video about the making of the swimsuit edition showed (inadvertently??) a nipple from Elle Macpherson while all her cohorts covered up.

Shiva Gholamianzadeh in Minotaur, I hope my admittance to heaven is not made contingent on my ability to spell her name.

Franke Potente in Blueprint.