Back in town after 25 years, in a new print, this time uncut (courtesy of the Human Rights Charter's free-speech guarantees), is Walerian Borowczyk's notorious erotic fable about Beauty and the Beast in a modern chateau.
La Bête at its best resembles Renoir crossed with Bunuel. At its worst it's like any payon-demand porn video available to clients in their hotel rooms, except that the sexual threshings in the woods are not between in-and-out male studs and compliantly passive females, but between a stark-naked American heiress and an ursine beast with an insatiable lust for cross-species copulation.
I'm not sure if the heavily censored version permitted public exhibition in 1975 with a prophylactic X Certificate from the old GLC wasn't more
effective. It necessarily left a lot - six minutes, in fact - to the imagination. Actually seeing Leviticus's taboos about man (and woman, too, in this sermon) lying with beasts being broken to Scarlatti's upbeat score, and later subjected to a crisply sardonic (and misogynistic) commentary by the two Catholic prelates who stumble on the nude body of the lady's latterday suitor and bestial descendant with his vestigial tail still in place, doesn't rouse anything very much except a giggle at its borderline relationship to a perverse Monty Python gag.
Highly charged with fetishistic imagery focused on the human anatomy, and saturated with onanistic interludes, the film's strait-laced setting in the aristocratic household of ducal owners, pederastic priest and lascivious black footman forms a classic context for a pagan work. Of art? Absolutely. Of pornography? Maybe. Of entertainment? Don't even ask.
La Bete
Cert: 18
