Immoral Women (1979)

ugly sexual encounter and a feverish course of revenge. It is the film’s darkest stretch: perverse, bloody and deliberately uncomfortable rather than conventionally sexy. The final tale moves to contemporary Paris, where wealthy gallery owner’s wife Marie is kidnapped by a bungling gunman who hides his movements beneath a ridiculous shell of cardboard boxes. Forced to telephone her husband about the ransom, she discovers that the fellow may care more about buying a painting than recovering his naked wife. Meanwhile, her Doberman César follows her scent through the city and closes in on the warehouse where she is being held. Borowczyk shoots all this as a collision between high art and dirty appetite—sometimes witty, sometimes gorgeous, sometimes nasty and occasionally plain daft. The unevenness is part of its grubby charm: the Renaissance chapter feels like an obscene old-master painting brought to life, Marceline’s story gets under the skin like a bad dream, and Marie’s ordeal becomes an absurd sexual cartoon with a vicious edge.

The film skips from 1520 Rome to fin-de-siècle France and finally to the Paris of the late 1970s, yet every period is recognisably Borowczyk territory: ornate, voyeuristic and forever suspicious of respectable people. The first episode makes the richest visual impression, using Roman ruins, studios, paintings, sculptures, diaphanous costumes and an elaborate wooden contraption that turns a man’s lust into a live-action mousetrap. The middle story replaces Renaissance splendour with clipped lawns, bourgeois dining rooms, animal pens and the blood-and-steel ugliness of an abattoir. Modern Paris then appears as a strange comic maze of bookshops, crowded streets, traffic, alleys and a bleak riverside warehouse. A soft haze hangs over much of the photography, giving bare flesh and ancient stone the same tactile glow. The vibe is not romantic soft-focus erotica, however; it is art-house sleaze with a sardonic grin, shifting without warning from sensual pleasure to grotesque violence and back again. You may laugh, recoil or wonder what the hell Borowczyk was smoking, but bland it certainly isn’t.

Marina Pierro owns the picture as Margherita, all dark-haired poise, heavy-lidded confidence and unapologetic flesh; she looks perfectly at home among the paintings because Borowczyk photographs her like one. Her nudity feels commanding rather than coy, and her cool performance makes the panting men around her seem like wind-up toys. Gaëlle Legrand gives Marceline a feral, unsettling energy beneath that magnificent cloud of hair, though her episode is too disturbing to be treated as simple titillation. Pascale Christophe brings chic, adult allure to Marie, remaining oddly composed even as her kidnapping descends into bondage, humiliation and sexual menace. The explicitness is high by conventional cinema standards: abundant full-frontal male and female nudity, simulated sex, masturbation, sexual assault, slaughterhouse gore and a notorious animal-sex implication involving the rabbit. It stops short of hardcore pornography, but only after trampling enthusiastically over nearly every boundary of good taste.