Regrettably, through his obscene extended finale, Borowczyk throws away a first half which could be considered to intermittently hold some of his most pleasing cinema yet.

If Borowczyk's Beast is in fact intended to have a symbolic meaning, then its connotations can only be negative and backward I would suggest, however, that any symbolism found within The Beast has been fabricated by those looking for it and not crafted by Borowczyk himself. Romilda's fear and resistance soon turns to pleasure and lust, giving the entire sequence, and thereby the film as a whole, a distinctly sordid and misogynistic flavour. It's a sequence which starts with blunt animal metaphor - a problem found previously in Blanche - as Romilda innocently follows a stray lamb into the woods before moving swiftly through the unintentionally ludicrous (the Beast's unconvincing latex member receives far too much screen time) to the downright horrid. Seemingly wanting to bookend his film with shocking, bestial sex scenes, Borowczyk spends much of the final half an hour of his film presenting a dream sequence which depicts the titular creature pursuing and then raping a young woman, Romilda (Sirpa Lane), in a French woodland during the 18th Century. What's even more troubling is that this is relatively restrained compared to what The Beast still has in store for us.

We are 'treated' to close-ups of flared nostrils, steaming equine bodies and dribbling semen in a sequence which can only be described, rather disturbingly, as horse porn. However, what the director offers in The Beast makes his previous film seem relatively tame and chaste in comparison. One of the first images Borowczyk presents us with is a stallion's fully erect penis, going on to fill the opening minutes of his film with graphic scenes of the aforementioned aroused gee-gee getting it on quite vigorously with a mare. ' A film with a capacious hollow centre, surrounded by some of the mostĬhauvinistic and vulgar cinema you're ever likely to experience'.įamously a film which has courted controversy wherever it has gone since its initial release in 1975, The Beast sees Borowczyk move further into graphic, taboo-challenging cinema following the sexually explicit and largely disappointing Immoral Tales originally released a year earlier.

The beast 1975 sirpa lane