The last of five collaborations between Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk and French novelist André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Love Rites is an object lesson in creating a surrealist work of art. The 1987 film exhibits an exacting preoccupation with the specificities of places and objects, while at the same time remaining open to spontaneity, coincidence, and the ineffable mystery of existence. It also suggests a hybrid between two early surrealist novels, André Breton’s Nadja (the fraught relationship with an inscrutable woman) and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (the almost mythic fixation on various Parisian locations).
Cocky clothes buyer Hugo Arnold (Mathieu Carrière) picks up a woman who calls herself Myriam Gwen (Marina Pierro) in the Paris Metro, after which they wander around the city, getting to know each other. Eventually, she takes him back to her place, ostensibly for a bit of hanky-panky, only for things to take a very different course than anticipated. Turns out, though, that Myriam introducing herself as an actress isn’t the only well-rehearsed bit of stagecraft in the world of Love Rites.
The name of de Mandiargues’s novel, Tout Disparaitra (which translates to Everything Must Go), finds its echo in a sign glimpsed in the Metro station, which Myriam declares would be an excellent title for their “little adventure.” By the end of the film, Hugo finds himself stripped of his possessions, his identity, and ultimately his very freedom. This act of willful erasure is visualized from time to time as a magic slate displaying text or illustrations that are then wiped clean. The slate’s appearances have nothing to do with the overall flow of the narrative, but rather act as objective correlatives or ironic commentary on the proceedings.
From the Metro, Hugo and Myriam head to the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church, where she further beguiles him with sordid tales from her past life. Like most examples of artful erotica, her stories contain elements (here incest) meant to provoke as well as to titillate. (Not for nothing was the Marquis de Sade christened by the surrealists as “the Divine Marquis.”) The actual amount of sadomasochism on display throughout Love Rites, though, is low, little more than some light bondage. What’s more, the film has a distinct sense of humor about it, as in the quite deliberate strain of mock-Orientalism at work later on when Myriam describes having to submit to the caprices of Ping, the mute Cambodian sadist.
In Love Rites, there’s a fruitful disconnect between sight and sound. The presence of a narrator (Jean Négroni) allows the language to go further than the image, gleefully crossing over into unabashed pornography during the final encounter between Myriam and Hugo, while the camera discreetly hides behind a series of screens and lattice works. Elsewhere, the narrator expounds upon and enhances the fabulist elements in the narrative, comparing the lovers to figures out of Greco-Roman mythology. This pays off earlier street-scene shots where the camera lingered on statues of various mythological heroes and deities. The mysteries of sex, the film seems to suggest, open us up to other levels of existence.
Love Rites is preoccupied with doubles and doubling. Mirrors and other reflective surfaces abound, and the film is consciously divided into two acts, which Hugo comments upon when entering the “fantastical boudoir” where the couple’s ceremonies of love will be enacted. Hugo’s initiatory progress is marked by two long staircases, one in his apartment building and one leading up to Myriam’s boudoir, and the camera lingers for an unnaturally long time on his descent and ascent. Space is hieratic here, leading to a possible epiphany.
The stage is thus set for the consummation Hugo so devoutly wishes. But what he actually gets is something else altogether. Rather than fulfilment, he ends up desolate and emptied out. Myriam’s assault on him is comprehensive: physical, emotional, even moral. She reduces him to zero and turns him loose on the streets—all the while still stage-managing his every move. His final encounter with Myriam’s double, Mériam ben Saada (Josy Bernard), sees him embracing his fate as “the nameless author of the ultimate crime.” Only by losing everything can Hugo hope to find himself again. Once everything has gone, what remains?
Image/Sound
Kino’s 1080p HD presentation of Love Rites looks greatly improved over Cult Epics’s 2005 DVD release, especially when it comes to clarity of fine detail and image depth. Given the deliberately muted palette, colors look vibrant; blacks are uncrushed; and grain levels appear well-resolved, even in a few of the darker scenes where the grain intensifies. The audio track is two-channel Master Audio, which does well by the film’s intricate sound design, ornate dialogue, and frequent bursts of Bach’s organ music on the soundtrack.
Extras
Daniel Bird, co-founder of the nonprofit Friends of Walerian Borowczyk, delivers a wide-ranging and informative commentary track, comparing Love Rites to its source material (and Borowczyk’s other collaborations with André Pieyre de Mandiargues), as well as explaining the links between the film and Borowczyk’s larger body of work (graphic arts as well as his other films). Bird also elaborates on how several of Borowczyk’s films relate to the horror genre, and claims that Love Rites disproves the conventional wisdom that he was an artist in decline at this point, having just come off the debacle that was Emmanuelle 5.
Included as an extra, the film’s director’s cut runs almost 15 minutes shorter, losing a whole street-scene sequence involving a pesky Japanese photographer. The removal improves the film’s pacing overall, but you do miss out on some of the original’s documentary flavor. The other truncated scene in the subway includes a shot that establishes a symbolic connection between Myriam and Mériam, so its absence lessens some of the film’s surreal mystery.
Made for German TV in 1976, Borowczyk’s 40-minute documentary Brief von Paris consists of briskly edited, impressionistic footage of various Parisian neighborhoods, clearly paving the way for similar scenes in Love Rites. At one point, you can make out a billboard for Borowczyk’s The Margin from the same year. In a recent on-camera interview, the amusingly plainspoken Mathieu Carrière gives his own reading of the film, discusses working with Borowczyk, laments the difficulty of delivering the film’s baroque dialogue, and amusingly admits to the frequency with which he’s played an “image for masturbation.”
Overall
Enigmatic and exquisite, Walerian Borowczyk’s Love Rites makes its Blu-ray debut boasting a gorgeous transfer and a handful of excellent supplements.
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