4. Immoral Tales (1974)
Walerian Borowczyk directed this pleasing piece of arthouse smut, I really enjoy the movie but Borowczyk fell out of favour with the film critics because of the sexual goings on which the critics deemed filth. His reputation never recovered from this film. The film is divided into four parts. In the first part, a boy and a girl are on the beach when the tide comes in. The young lad has a fixation with high tides and gets his female companion to fellate him so that he can experience orgasm at the highest point of the tide. The second story concerns a young girl who is locked in a room. She ends up looking at rude books and masturbating with a lot of cucumbers that are placed in the room for no discernible reason other than for lewd purposes. The third story features Elizabeth Bathory, the notorious serial killer who goes around selecting young girls to kill and then bathe in their blood for the purpose of retaining her youth. The fourth story has Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of the pope Alexander VI indulging in sex with the male members of the Borgia family while Savonarola doles out anti-clerical speeches. I can appreciate the film as a piece of bawdy art, much like Pasolini's Decameron, Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights. The film looks beautiful and has several striking scenes. There is attention paid to time period details in the movie and the use of music really brings us back in time to the periods depicted. I think it works both as an art film and a piece of soft core smut. You will never look at a cucumber in quite the same way again. Copious amounts of nudity abound in Immoral Tales - especially when we are treated to the sight of young ladies cavorting naked in a shower for about ten minutes in the Elizabeth Bathory section. That is the main problem of the film, it offers up sex and nudity in place of plot and hopes no one will notice as they will be mesmerised by all the smut. The cucumber session must last for 8/9 minutes. But there is a real artistry behind it all that sums up the unique talent of Borowczyk - he could simultaneously craft films that worked both as art house pieces and also as a titillating piece of filth. At the end of his career, he had paddled in so much filth, he could no longer work in exalted art house circles - he was reduced to filming Emmanuelle 5. Smut mongering effectively ruined his career but we still have Immoral Tales to remind us of the Great Man's talent as an art house director who was not afraid to tackle sexually bold themes.