Love Rites (1987)

afternoon. The pair eventually climb to a borrowed apartment and its enclosed, faintly unreal boudoir, where seduction becomes ceremony. Hugo gets the sex he has been chasing, but pleasure is only the bait. Myriam begins directing the encounter, introducing bondage, humiliation and increasingly disturbing games that leave him physically exposed and psychologically cornered. His money, clothes, possessions and swagger are methodically separated from him as the woman he thought he had bought turns buyer, judge and stage director. Walerian Borowczyk shoots this reversal less like a conventional skin flick than a surreal chamber play about lust, vanity and emasculation. Mirrors, cages, screens, staircases, religious imagery and odd little objects carry as much weight as the dialogue, while an urbane narrator describes desires that the camera sometimes coyly refuses to show. The result can be slow and excessively literary—Mathieu Carrière and Marina Pierro occasionally sound as though they are reciting a particularly filthy philosophical essay—but its icy, dreamlike control gets under your skin. What starts as a dandy’s lucky pickup gradually becomes a ritual of erasure, with Hugo realising far too late that Myriam has been acting from a script he was never allowed to read.

This is late-1980s Paris without the usual neon, shoulder pads and saxophone sleaze of period erotica. Borowczyk prefers Métro tunnels, stone façades, old churches, public gardens, statues and the banks of the Seine, turning familiar Paris into a mythological maze where a man can follow a woman for a few hours and emerge unsure of his own identity. Saint-Germain-des-Prés lends the opening wander a literate, bohemian flavour, but the city steadily grows emptier and more uncanny as the couple move away from public spaces and into private rooms. Bach on the soundtrack, baroque language and the film’s muted colours make contemporary Paris feel centuries old. The vibe is sensual but chilly, playful for a while and then quietly menacing—a cerebral erotic fever dream for viewers who like their naked flesh mixed with symbolism, black humour and a sharp kick to masculine pride.

Marina Pierro is the whole dangerous package: raven-haired, heavy-eyed, voluptuous and magnificently composed, with the calm smile of a woman watching a mouse investigate a trap. She plays Myriam as part prostitute, part actress and part dark goddess, letting Hugo—and the viewer—wonder where performance ends and appetite begins. Pierro is generously nude, with lingering views of her breasts, pubic hair and shapely backside, while the sexual material includes oral sex, light bondage, voyeuristic close-ups and sadomasochistic play. It is explicit enough to raise the temperature, though less graphically carnal than Borowczyk’s most notorious work; the real obscenity lies in Myriam’s ruthless control. Carrière gamely supplies the male nudity and wounded ego, but Pierro owns the boudoir, the ritual and every poor bastard foolish enough to mistake her invitation for surrender.

Gorgeous Italian Heartthrob Marina Pierro (who was in Art of Love & Immoral Women) meets and seduces a vain Paris clothes buyer on the metro and he thinks he’s scored a compliant submissive hooker… but…

Hugo Arnold, a self-absorbed middle-aged fashion buyer riding high on his own charm, locks eyes with the enigmatic Myriam on the Paris underground. She’s fixing her makeup with languid allure; he’s instantly hooked. Delighted to discover she’s a part-time actress and full-time prostitute, he pursues her through nocturnal chats about poetry and life, across platforms and into churches, certain he’s calling the shots. She leads him to a secret boudoir for an afternoon of tying, teasing and submission that starts with her as his willing plaything—oral attentions with hands bound, sheer dresses hiked, intimate views lingering—before the ritual reverses into something far more commanding and scratchingly fierce, leaving him adrift in mysteries that refuse tidy resolution.

Walerian Borowczyk’s final feature, adapted from André Pieyre de Mandiargues’ novel, wraps late-’80s French arthouse eroticism in his signature surrealist-symbolist style: meticulous attention to objects, places and sudden bursts of the bizarre, scored to Bach, less pure titillation than cerebral mind-fuck with lingering sensuality. Shot on the atmospheric streets, metro and riverside of Paris—Saint-Germain-des-Prés wanderings, candlelit churches, shadowy boudoirs and the Seine at night—the film throbs with a cool, enigmatic vibe of nocturnal seduction turned labyrinthine power game, equal parts luxurious and unsettling.

Marina Pierro as Myriam is pure magnetic smolder: dark-haired, gorgeously aristocratic features, that knowing half-smile and body that shifts from inviting softness to predatory elegance. She owns every frame with effortless allure, whether half-clad and bound or turning the tables with fierce nails and demand. The film delivers tasteful yet frank softcore heat—unobstructed views of her unshaven mound, butterfly alighting on intimate skin and breast, rhythmic oral with wrists tied, lingering camera on bare curves—classy enough for Borowczyk’s artistry, explicit enough to leave you properly stirred.