Primitive Equipment

Is Walerian Borowczyk’s Blanche any good?

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A movie so bad I couldn't review it. I won’t. I will not. No no no! My time’s too valuable for this nonsense. And anyway, my words have too much taste to touch what offends their delicacy. But Michel Simon’s face is amazing, says Mr B. Yes, the ravages of the French film industry upon a majestic visage is an essay in itself, but…alas, my friend, this pasty blancmange, even if does fill the screen, cannot save this movie. Could Cheshire Cat carry off Alice in Wonderland on just his whiskers?

Read the critics, Mr B insists. He goes to his computer and types in Derek Malcolm and Walerian Borowczyk. Finding what he wants, he quickly scans it; a fisherman baiting his rod… The worm safely attached, he turns round and looks up at me, his eyes a gleam of mischief. Damn the man! He knows me too well. I’m to pay for my keep by tapping out these words.

Derek! What have you written? A classic of its kind, you say. What foolishness is this? Mr B chuckles, as I hammer out the question marks; then tip-toes down the stairs, hoping I won’t hear him, as I throw down my exclamations. Kafka! A major artist! My third is a spear I thrust into an author helpless on the ground. The laptop shudders under my attack, red ink seeping out of the screen, the paragraphs crying out for an ambulance... To be done for murder, will I? Damn you Mr B! Bad enough losing two hours to such claptrap, but am I to do twenty years for killing an article? Have you no conscience! Tell me man! Is there no remorse?

Blanche reveals a director with no talent for actors. Reduced to automatons, they are switched on by sex, jealousy and revenge of the most malicious kind; the crudest of the passions. We expect this of machines, of course, for lacking finesse they can only parody human behaviour. It is why these love scenes fall into unintentional burlesque, as word and gesture, losing all fine grades of meaning, become the dumb signs of simpletons. Indeed, we are supposed believe these characters are idiots. The Chatelain is senile. The King a fool. The Page a priapic knave. The Lover stupid. The Lady an air-head. Here is Rabelais without the jokes and satire. We suspect a hippy who has smoked too much pot and attended too many demos. Oh yeah, we must overthrow the past, man; he drawls. You know, it was so brutal and stupid back then. Yeah, they didn’t treat their women right. And those men… Man-o-man, sadists and old farts, impaled on their own impotence. It was real ugly in those days; there was no love there, man; they weren’t cool, and they hated us young. There was no freedom in those days, man. Yeah, they’d kill anything that was beautiful. There was a deep ugliness in there, man, I’m telling you. In truth, this arrested teenager projects himself onto a past of which he knows nothing, save some vague recollections from his schooldays. It is why we watch kids hugging and adolescents gambolling, not knights playing with ladies at courtly love.

Borowczyk has no feel for subtlety. Every scene is overdone. To cover up this deficiency he sets his film in the Middle Ages; which gulls the critics into thinking it has authenticity. I was sold this movie with a clever sales rap: this film is the best recreation of Medieval times. Aargh! I throw Mr B in the bath and chuck last week’s vegetables over him. Anticipating Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and Medea what do I get? A French Carry On. Like too many British films of the 1960s, when losing confidence, they slid into hammy character-acting, situation comedy and the softest of soft-porn, the serious intent is buried under tat. Oh, there’s a few trinkets: the period music, the costumes, the wall hangings; and it is set in a castle, but then so were many of the Hammer movies - are we to respect Dracula's scholarly credentials? Objects by themselves do not create an atmosphere, that most vital quality for period drama. It is why this film has none of that alienating strangeness, so marvellously evoked by the masterpieces of Pasolini and Paradjanov. Blanche is wholly of its time, when from the late Sixties low budget movies tried to appear highbrow, while titillating and amusing a mass audience. Only those with pretensions but with no real taste were taken in.1 

Malcolm gives the game away…

…he started off as an animator of pinpoint delicacy and the kind of surreal edge that reminded one of Dada and Luis Buñuel considerably more than Walt Disney. 

An actor is not a cartoon. Try turn him into one and he exhibits the clumsiness of the human animal; nothing like those graceful beasts in Disney’s Jungle Book. Whatever Borowczyk’s origins we see no surrealism here. Just the incongruities that arise from lack of control and an absence of skill. Maybe the director had read Victor Hugo. Does he think The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a realist fiction, that he will tweak slightly, by adding Sixties sex and Sixties violence, stronger stuff for the stronger stomachs of the Counter-Culture? If you are ignorant enough to believe that the Middle Ages was full of clowns fucking and beheading each other you may enjoy this film, but that a critic…

A classic of its kind… Blanche is set in 13th-century France where Simon, who must have been well over 80 at the time, plays an almost senile baron with a simple but beautiful young wife (Branice) who everyone, including the King, lusts after. There is a lecherous page and a handsome but rather vacant lover too, and the film is a kind of fairytale dance of death where tragedy is probable, even if a happy outcome isn't entirely out of the question.

Almost the whole film takes place in the Baron's castle, where the king comes to stay. And its winding stone staircases, gloomy corridors and rooms full of bizarre decor and mechanical devices are as important as any characters in the film. Once again, every tiny detail is made to count double.

Blanche, who climbs naked out of her bath early in the film, has a pet white dove in a cage, which is almost her alter ego as she flutters round her admirers, half frightened and half fascinated. She is a creature made for trouble and it isn't a total surprise when she is bricked into one of the castle walls.

Borowczyk's art, which often looks like a carefully animated painting, and has the pessimistic urge one associates with Franz Kafka, is invariably about sex, love and death…

…how could you, Derek? The third paragraph calls us back: look look: ah yes. We suspect our critic hasn’t watched this film in years; a few images all that remain in the memory: it is Bartolomeo, the King’s Page, not Blanche, who is bricked up…inside the lady’s bed chamber. The nostalgia of memory is what we are reading in this piece. A few memory-pictures have replaced the reality of the movie. We pull the polaroid snaps out, and go sentimental over our childhood days; the boredom, tears and tantrums having long faded away. Malcolm has forgotten the acting. Good enough for third-rate comedy, it is so absurd and overcooked that it monopolises our attention; the mise en scène left in the background, with all the presence of cheap cardboard. This acting is crude, as is the plotting which is outrageous. Malcolm calls this a “fairy-tale” quality. It is one way of describing am-dram.

The critic’s memory a mist through which we glimpse a castle, some monstrous hounds, a woman emerging naked from a bath. “Fairy-tale” is Derek’s hazy recollection that makes a few half-forgotten fragments beautiful. The meat of the movie long since evacuated from the mind. Derek Malcolm is not writing about a movie. It is movie stills he is recalling. 

Why bring in Kafka? Those knowing smiles. The cheesy grins. The flamboyant clasp of a woman’s thighs. A Wagnerian death scene accompanied by saucepans and spoons… He’s as bad as this?2 Kafka! Yes, Mr B, I’m throwing those spears again. Kafka often wheeled in when we don’t know what to say about a work of fiction. We become like K, a little man lost inside a vast labyrinth, the film or novel that makes no sense to us. Kafka is shorthand for “I think this film might be shite, but I mustn’t say this just in case it is a masterpiece beyond my comprehension.” Kafka! There I go again Mr B. No, I’ll stick to my instincts, which I’ve cultivated over thirty years of arduous watching and reading… This is a French farce, popular in the provinces in the 1880s, which the director has set in the Middle Ages and played straight. Why? I can guess: Borowczyk doesn’t know any better. He has petit-bourgeois tastes he mistakenly thinks are artistic. A common fault of the technician.

(Review: Blanche)

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1. Pauline Kael, often better on the audience than on the film, writes acutely about this period, when the idea of the Counter-Culture had captured Hollywood, who thought they could make money out of it. (Deeper Into Movies)

2.  Yes, in some of those unfinished stories, which should never have been published. (The Complete Stories)