BOROWCZYK FINDS REALITY IN ANIMATION
‘Goto, Isle of Love’ divides critics
Among the oldest dichotomies in movies is between those motion pictures that take the world as given (cinema verite) and those that create their very own (animation). The boundary between these poles is not absolute. There are movies like Walerian Borowczyk’s Goto, Isle of Love that suggest animated cartoons made with physical sets and real actors.
Initially an animator, Borowczyk (1923-2006) left his native Poland for France in 1959 after winning an award at the Brussels Festival of Experimental Film. Goto, Isle of Love (1969), his first live-action feature (newly out on disc from Olive Films), was taken by some as a political allegory. Although set in an imaginary island nation suggestive of a penal colony, it is essentially a bleak, anti-authoritarian farce in the cartoonish tradition of French avant-gardist Alfred Jarry’s provocative 1896 play Ubu Roi. A true surrealist, Borowczyk inexplicably compared it to King Kong.
The bad-tempered tyrant Goto (a rumbling, hammy Pierre Brasseur, best remembered for playing the heavy in Children of Paradise) is cuckolded by his impassive, wistful consort (Borowczyk’s wife and frequent star, Ligia Branice) and overthrown by a clever prisoner (Guy SaintJean). Despite the tawdry erotic intrigue, the movie’s plot is less compelling than its strongly controlled mise-en-scene, which, with its abundance of creaky machines and fusty bric-a-brac, evokes a 19th-century cabinet of curiosities.
Critic Howard Thompson, who panned Goto in The New York Times when it was shown at the 1969 New York Film Festival, likened the movie’s studied drabness to that of the classic TV sitcom The Honeymooners. While not intended as a compliment, the analogy does speak well of Borowczyk’s Kabuki minimalism and bouts of slapstick. Goto
was largely shot, amid the tumult of the May 1968 student uprising in Paris, in an abandoned factory once operated by Pierre and Marie Curie; static and self-contained, it’s as close to a puppet show or a graphic novel as it is to a conventional movie.
Goto never seems to have had a US commercial release, although it was widely appreciated in France. Borowczyk was featured on the cover of Cahiers du Cinema and interviewed by the journal’s editor at that time, Jacques Rivette. His subsequent features were increasingly sex-obsessed and even pornographic — the relatively staid Goto is a voluptuously shabby Punch and Judy show anticipating the work of the Brothers Quay or the great Czech animator Jan Svankmajer.
Mise-en-scene also trumps narrative in Jacques Demy’s underappreciated fairy tale The Pied Piper (released in the United States in 1972 and new on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber). Here, however, the political allegory is strongly articulated. A British production, shot in Germany and set in 1349, the movie opens with a band of travelling players stumbling on gruesome evidence of the Black Death. It goes on to show a pestilent society in the mercenary town of Hamelin, where class conflict is ubiquitous and religious hypocrites, oppressive rulers and mercenary businessmen thrive. The mayor is diverting public funds for a cathedral while proffering a large dowry to marry his 11-year-old daughter to a baron’s contemptible son. After rats invade the wedding feast, the town tries to deal with the plague by burning a Jewish alchemist at the stake.
As a wandering minstrel with an enigmatic hippie smile, Scottish folk singer Donovan seems vaguely embarrassed in the title role, while Donald Pleasence and John Hurt run boisterously amok as the villainous baron and his evil son. But, however uneven the performances, the production design by Assheton Gorton (whose previous credits included two Richard Lester films and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up) is outstanding.
The Pied Piper also has echoes of Ubu Roi in its outlandish medieval costumes, while the crowd scenes have a Brueghelian density. Not exactly suitable for young children, the movie might be an ergot-fuelled version of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal or, as I thought when I caught a rare revival 10 years ago, a Disney version of Albert Camus’ wartime allegory The Plague.
Released on the bottom half of a double bill with the forgotten sci-fi film Z.P.G., The Pied Piper was largely ignored — Donovan was no draw — although the left-wing film journal Jump-Cut praised it as a “neo-Marxist fairy tale”. France was even less hospitable. Not until late 1975 did The Pied Piper find a distributor there, hailed by auteurists as a masterpiece and condemned on the right as counterculture propaganda.
Arrow Academy has released a dual Blu-ray/DVD edition of the three films from Rivette’s never-completed quartet, begun in the mid-1970s, that was to be collectively known as Scenes From a Parallel Life.
The Jacques Rivette Collection includes two interesting if failed experiments, Merry-Go-Round, a bizarre buddy film with Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro (and Maria Schneider, years after Last Tango in Paris), and the female pirate saga Noroit, starring Geraldine Chaplin, as well as the far more substantial Duelle.
Duelle — which features Bulle Ogier and Juliet Berto as rival goddesses, the sun and the moon, waging war in contemporary Paris — is of a piece with the preceding Rivette fantasies Out 1: Spectre and Celine and Julie Go Boating. It is a live-action comic book movie with no special effects beyond its total conviction.