Born in Poland in 1923, Walerian Borowczyk studied as a visual artist before moving to Paris at the beginning of the sixties where he made a number of innovative short films, some animated, some a mixture of animation with live action. By the 1970s he had established himself as one of Europe’s leading arthouse directors, with films like ‘Goto, Island of Love’ (1968) and ‘Immoral Tales’ (1973) earning him the reputation as a master of artful eroticism. So in 1975, when he shot his classic moral tale ‘The Story of Sin’, Borowczyk’s career was at its peak. Unfortunately for him (although fortunately for filmgoers), in the same year he also released the deliciously shocking class satire ‘La Bête’, certainly a far more interesting film, but one whose explicit perversity would doom the director to a future of sexploitation and soft core (‘culminating’ in the indignity of 1987’s ‘Emmanuelle V’).
By an uncanny coincidence, the director’s own descent from pure auteur to tainted pornographer is parallelled and foreshadowed by the decline-and-fall narrative of ‘The Story of Sin’ – based on Stefan Zeromski’s 1908 novel, and the only film Borowczyk ever made in his native Poland. Devout virgin Ewa (newcomer Grazyna Dlugolecka) falls deeply in love with Lukasz Niepolomski (Jerzy Zelnik), a young anthropologist who has taken up lodgings with Ewa’s bourgeois parents in Warsaw while he tries to secure a divorce from his estranged wife. Against her mother’s advice, Ewa moves in with the married man and nurses him as he recovers from a wound received in a duel with his wealthy patron Count Szczerbic (Olgierd Lukaszewicz). Shortly after Lukasz has recovered, he is imprisoned in Rome, and Ewa’s infatuated pursuit of him takes her from Rome to Nice, from Berlin to Vienna (variously aided or impeded by a lovesick Szczerbic, a pair of thieving villains, a former lodger of Ewa’s pare nts, and a saint-like social utopist), as she is reduced from pious virginity to infanticide, murder and prostitution, before finally attaining a tragic redemption.
Despite its sensationalist subject matter, the relative restraint of ‘The Story of Sin’ may surprise – and even disappoint – fans of Borowczyk’s other films. It is a conventional story of a woman’s life destroyed by love, not unlike ‘Madame Bovary’ or The Life of O-Haru, and it is told in an undistinguished, if classical, style. There are without doubt some beautiful images, including a Warsaw park shot like an impressionist painting, and Ewa’s naked body covered in red rose petals (with an obvious influence on ‘American Beauty’), as well as Borowczyk’s trademark fixation on objects (shoes, canes, phonographs etc.) – and while Dlugolecka herself offers filmgoers little with which to empathise in her Ewa, there are some memorable performances from her co-stars (especially Roman Wilhelmi and Marek Walczewski as the larcenous debauchers Pochron and Plaza-Splawski). None of this, however, is enough to excuse the film’s attention-sapping pace. In retrospect you will realise that ‘The Story of Sin’ was full of melodramatic incidents and wild coincidences, but as all of them are so understated, and most are crammed into the last half hour, it is difficult to be engaged by this plodding, overlong film.