Cited as the single greatest
influence on the surreal comic animation of director Terry Gilliam, the cinema
of Polish avant garde animator turned pornographic provocateur Walerian
Boroczyk consists of a diverse library of films that for the most part have
remained undiscovered by international cinephiles until just recently thanks to
the dedicated efforts of Arrow Video and Gilliam who have been resurrecting his
long thought lost works.
Still a divisive surrealist
treading a fine line between the experimental avant-garde short films from the
1920s and 30s and mere pure sexploitation, Borowczyk’s work continues to
polarize and defy easy categorization. In
the same year the director’s most controversial film The Beast, an X rated fantasy bestiality take on Beauty and the Beast, the electrically
charged filmmaker would direct arguably one of his tamer and more accessible
works in his oeuvre: Story of Sin.
Loosely based on the novel
by Stefan Zeromski, Story of Sin sets
its sights on Nineteenth Century Poland regarding a young woman named Ewa
(Grazyna Dlugolecka) who falls madly in love with a lodger named Lukasz
Niepolomski (Jerzy Zelnik) before embarking on her own tumultuous journey of
sexual awakening and self-discovery.
Somewhere between the handsomely austere visual scheme of Pier Paolo
Pasolini, the observant social criticism in Far
from the Madding Crowd and the tawdry perversity of Luis Bunuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid, Story of Sin thrusts viewers deep into
the shaky moral compass of Ewa and all the various detours and sexual
misadventures she encounters.
An elegantly photographed,
directed and edited piece aided by handsome costume design and the director’s
own stock trade of classical music, Story
of Sin reminded me most of Sion Sono’s fetishistic Guilty of Romance for how it depicts from the female perspective an
ordinary woman’s descent into sexploitation in her futile pursuits of happiness. While the story of a woman’s romantic
longings are hardly revolutionary, the social context it takes place in is far
from simple with many complications along the way for our heroine and
conundrums for the viewer to deal with.
One area which struck me involved Borowczyk’s use of close-ups,
particularly the eyes. Watch for when
Ewa trades gazes with Lukasz and tell me Scorsese and Aronofsky weren’t
influenced on some level by the visual motif.
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| You've got the eyes of a stranger. |
Far from his richest but the
most indicative of the signature motifs that would define Borowczyk’s work, Story of Sin coupled with his classic
animated film Jeux des anges represent
strong introductory chapters to one of Poland’s most underappreciated and
clandestine auteurs since the rediscovery of Andrzej Zulawski. Not for all tastes as some will inevitably be
put off by the carnal exploitation with some films more sexually explicit than
others, Walerian Borowczyk is clearly a neglected, wholly idiosyncratic visual
artist whose films are only now getting the attention they so deserve.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki