I’ve watched a few disparate adaptations & reinterpretations of Beauty and the Beast in recent years, each with their own unique window into the dark magic of the fairy tale: the intensely sensual surrealism of the French version from 1946, the tactile storybook atmospherics of the Czech version from 1979, the Internet Age psychedelia of the animated Japanese version from 2021.  All of these retellings of the “tale as old as time” have, of course, touched on the hesitant attraction of an innocent young woman to a wounded, mysterious brute, but they also all ultimately focus more on the brute’s troubled past & cursed homelife than the inner life of the vulnerable beauty who loves him.  That’s where Walerian Borowczyk’s take on Beauty and the Beast finds new, forbidden territory worthy to explore (as a French adaptation from a Polish director, as long as we’re tracking geography).  A profane masterpiece of erotic menace & goofball social satire, Borowczyk’s perversion of the Beauty of the Beast template delves deeper into the monstrous extremes of women’s desire & pleasure than any other retelling I can name, to the point where the titular beast is merely a prop, a piece of furniture.  And wait until you see what the women do to the furniture!  The Beast is also singular its smutty eagerness to roll around in its own filth, an instinct that eventually pushes past the absurd into the sublime.  It’s the only version of this story I’ve seen that reasonably compares to the 1940s Cocteau film that defines so many adaptations’ basic visual language, mostly because both works were clearly made for abject perverts.

Technically, The Beast is not an adaptation of the 18th century fairy tale at all, at least not in terms of plot.  Like the recent anime version in Belle, Borowczyk’s film assumes the audience’s overfamiliarity with the source material, using its basic iconography for shorthand to push & warp its broader themes to new extremes.  This is still a story where a young, naive woman is married off to a cursed, wretched beast as a desperate financial ploy, with the deep sadness of their newly shared castle’s faded glory haunting their tentative romance.  And just in case you don’t catch his allusions to the fairy tale, Borowczyk hands the beast’s would-be bride a single red rose as a symbol of their delicate union.  It’s just that this is the kind of film where the young beauty mashes that rose into her clitoris as an unconventional masturbation tool, destroying it in lustful mania while entertaining a zoological ravishment fantasy that would make even the most jaded cinephile blush.  You’d think there’s nothing left that a Beauty and the Beast tale could do to surprise an audience, considering how many times it’s been retold & reshaped over the past few centuries.  The Beast dropped my jaw in shock in its very first frame, which zooms in on the textbook veterinary details of equine genital arousal.  The movie opens with relentless, repetitive images of erect horse cocks, fairly warning the audience that if you stick around long enough you will watch beasts fuck in intense biological detail.  You won’t find that kind of novelty in either of Disney’s retellings of the tale, but Borowczyk’s version has a way of distilling it down to its most essential, throbbing parts.

The beastly beau in this picture is the poorly socialized nephew of a decrepit French baron, living in a Grey Gardens style faded estate in the rot of long-lost wealth.  Hoping that a traditional Christian marriage will bring the mysteriously disgraced family back into the royal fold, they arrange for the ancient nobleman’s brother, a highly reputable Cardinal, to ordain his weirdo nephew’s union with a spritely British heiress.  Only, the heir to the estate is a hopeless loser, spending every waking moment in the stables overseeing an intensive horse-breeding program with a fervor that pushes beyond the practical to the disturbed.  Luckily, his wife-to-be is just as much of a shameless pervert, immediately matching the unholy, decadent vibe of the chateau with her own morbid sexual curiosity.  Since her beau is too socially obtuse to understand or reciprocate her enthusiasm, he leaves her sexually frustrated in the absurdly long wait for the Cardinal’s arrival, dead time that she fills with wet dreams of the estate’s sordid history.  There are superstitious rumors that a former lady of the house had mated with a cryptid beast who cyclically haunts the grounds every couple centuries, which is supposedly how the family was excommunicated from the Church in the first place.  The beauty sweatily reimagines this human-bestial coupling in extensive, graphic detail while furiously masturbating in her bridal nightgown until the poor cloth is ripped to shreds.  The horny, mythical beast of the past and the shy, grotesque beast of the present are eventually linked in a last-minute twist, but their connection is far less important than the perverted pleasures of the women who desire their touch (and thrusts).

Before The Beast devolves into full-on cryptid erotica, its value as a unique work gets lost among its many literary parallels, which extend far beyond the fairy tale it most overtly alludes to.  The long, pointless wait for the Cardinal’s arrival at the castle plays out as an existential joke, recalling surrealist works like The Exterminating Angel & Waiting for Godot.  There are also overt Buñuel parallels in its blasphemous mockery of the wealthy & religious ruling class as degenerate brutes, pushing its satire to de Sadist extremes but never fully matching the heightened Buñuelian humor at hand.  The centerpiece of the work really is the pornographic depictions of bestial fucking, then – starting with the horses, working up to more traditional onscreen heterosexual couplings, and then climaxing with the historical ravishment fantasy that swallows up most of the third act.  “Climax” is the only word you could really use to describe that payoff, too, since the humanoid wolverine who couples with an actual human being spurts semen by the bucketload for minutes on end as their tryst pushes beyond taste & reason.  A faux-classy harpsichord soundtrack keeps the mood lightly comical throughout this absurd display, and it concludes with a punchline in which the Cardinal, finally arrived, performs a grand, fingerwagging speech about the evils of bestiality & women’s libidos as if he were reading from a pre-prepared pamphlet.  In the end, it’s the women’s arousal & search for pleasure that registers as the film’s most blasphemous acts, even more so than its extensive depictions of their monstrous ravishment fantasies.  They’re greatly enjoying themselves, much to everyone else’s disgust & confusion, which remains a global movie censorship taboo to this day.

Borowczyk finds his own fairy tale visual language here with images that have no obvious connection to the Beauty and the Beast tale: a snail sliming its way across a lady’s sky-blue shoe; lurid flashes of red paint through hallway doors that slyly recall aroused genitals: pornographic close-ups on actual aroused genitals; etc.  As soon as his equivalent of Belle arrives on the estate taking dozens of dirty Polaroids of every perverted detail she can collect, it’s clear that he’s taking the story to new, distinct places.  Most Belles cower in fear of the erotic menace lurking in their new home castles, gradually warming up to the beast who stalks the grounds.  In this version, she’s so immediately fired up by the ugly erotic charge of the central pairing that it freaks out everyone around her, including the audience.  A half-century later, it remains a bold, hilarious, intensely alienating take on a story that’s continued to be told countless times since, but rarely with such gleeful prurience. 

-Brandon Ledet