Immoral Women (1979)
Set in Renaissance Rome, with the Gorgeous Borowczyk muse Marina Pierro who poisons a famous painter & a banker to be with her her lover.
Three women, three eras, and a trail of bruised male vanity: Borowczyk serves sex, revenge and black comedy with the manners of an art lover and the morals of a tomcat.
Walerian Borowczyk’s 1979 erotic triptych follows three women whose names begin with M—Margherita, Marceline and Marie—and whose appetites bring trouble to every man foolish enough to underestimate them. The richest episode opens in Renaissance Rome, where Margherita Luti divides her attention between the painter Raphael and her virile young lover Tomaso. She poses, teases and wanders naked through a masculine world of painters, priests and patrons, while the grotesque banker Bini spies on her and tries to purchase what cannot be bought. After Raphael humiliates him with a paintbrush and a painfully well-aimed gesture, Bini tempts Margherita with jewels and draws her into a poisonous conspiracy. The pleasure lies in watching this supposedly decorative woman quietly take control while the men become increasingly...
ridiculous. The second tale changes the mood completely. Marceline, the rebellious daughter of a smug bourgeois household, has an attachment to her pet rabbit that plainly crosses the boundaries of respectable family life. Her parents respond with casual cruelty, triggering a descent through grief, sexual violence, blood and an abattoir where human desire becomes as ugly and mechanical as slaughter. It is the film’s most disturbing chapter, and Borowczyk refuses to make it comfortably sexy; its erotic imagery curdles into grotesque revenge. The final story returns to broad, almost cartoonish absurdity. In contemporary Paris, Marie is kidnapped in broad daylight by a criminal concealed beneath a moving pile of cardboard boxes. He forces her to telephone her wealthy gallery-owner husband and demand a ransom, only for the husband’s priorities to prove rather less romantic than expected. While the increasingly inept abductor drags Marie through crowds, streets and an abandoned warehouse, her devoted Doberman follows her scent across the city. The three stories are uneven, but deliberately so: one resembles a dirty Renaissance painting, one a cruel Gothic fable, and one a kinky live-action cartoon. Beneath the nudity and provocation sits the same sour joke—men believe money, status and brute force give them power, while the women understand exactly how weak those things make them.
The film skips from Rome in 1520 to fin-de-siècle provincial France and finally to late-1970s Paris. Roman ruins, photographed after the tourists had gone, give the first chapter a stolen, sun-warmed sensuality; period interiors, lawns and slaughterhouse imagery make the second claustrophobic and nasty; busy Paris streets and riverside industrial spaces turn the third into urban farce. The overall vibe is unmistakably European art-house erotica from the anything-goes seventies: beautiful, chilly, perverse, occasionally funny and quite willing to ruin an erection with something genuinely unpleasant.
Marina Pierro is the main attraction, with dark eyes, heavy curves and the cool confidence of a woman who knows every man in the room has already surrendered. Borowczyk photographs her nude body with shameless admiration, yet her sly stillness and amused intelligence make Margherita more than decorative flesh. Pascale Christophe brings a softer, statuesque allure to Marie, even as her episode pushes her through bondage, humiliation and assault. Gaëlle Legrand gives Marceline a wild, unsettling quality; because the character is presented as an adolescent, her material feels deliberately troubling rather than playfully seductive. Explicitness is high by conventional cinema standards: prolonged full male and female nudity, vigorous sex, fetishistic animal implications, sexual violence and bloody imagery. This is not polished bedroom fantasy—it is erotic cinema with dirt under its fingernails and a nasty grin on its face.
This is the first episode of the three – featuring the Gorgeous Borowczyk muse Marina Pierro – Set in Renaissance Rome, with the lusty (and perpetually nude) leading lady sexually involved with a famous painter, a banker & her lover.
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