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29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Well, you can't say it's not original..., 3 Sep 2005
La Bête is one of those 70's European "art-films" that you hear people discussing on culture programmes and on the Internet, without ever really believing that it actually got made. I first came across it during a Film Four extreme season... the film being preceded by the obligatory Mark Kermode introduction, in which he talked about the shocking and confrontational imagery and the supposed artistic merits, before waxing lyrical on the history of the film's director, Walerian Borowczyk. Having already seen a number of the confrontational relics to the original "new European extreme" I wasn't expecting anything truly shocking... however, when a film opens on an image of a horse's moist, erect privates, you have to read just yours senses slightly.The film, as an artistic statement thirty-years on, is no masterpiece. In fact, it's quite poor to be honest. But Kermode's assessment, that this is a film like no other, is absolutely true. As he had done with his previous film, the soft-core erotica of the Immoral Tales, Borowczyk seems to be intent on pushing the audience's buttons (no real problem with that). As you would expect from a film that tows the line between the art-house and the grind-house, the film presents shocking scenes of intimacy and, indeed, faux-bestiality, wrapped up in a sleek pretentious veneer that seems to be aiming for the style of Burtolucci's early masterpiece, The Conformist. As well as the images of animal-intimacy, the film also throws in issues of pregnancy, rape, the class divide (master and servants, and all that) and inter-racial lust. It's all empty provocation of course, with Borowczyk unable (or unwilling) to tie any of this into some kind of message or theme, instead falling back on over-the-top sex-scenes and cringe-worthy prosthetics. In comparison to other controversial and confrontational statements of the same era- particularly films like In the Realm of the Senses and Pasolini's Salo - it's a bit of a one-note (or one-joke) film... sure, it's original, but it's empty too, and often quite dull. It's also not as beautiful (in the photographic sense) as some viewers have noted, with the overall look and design of the film paling in comparison to films like The Canterbury Tales, Barry Lyndon, 1900, Godard's Weekend, the abovementioned In the Realm of the Senses and even moments of Borowczyk's own Immoral Tales (...and that's not counting the hundreds of even more beautiful films made before or since). Thus, La Bête seems a little out of place... too pretentious to be taken seriously as a piece of exploitation, and too slight and unintelligent to appeal to the chin-stroking intellectuals. It's never clear whom the film is supposed to be aimed at... with La Bête only really offering any interest to the viewer in a curious "car-crash" sense. Still, a lot of people seem to like it, perhaps because of the negative stigma often attached to viewers who don't seem to grasp these supposedly deep works of Euro-genius (or perhaps they just like the film)? At any rate, I don't want to be the person to crap all over a much-loved film, but for me, La Bête was just a tired and tiresome throwback to the days of the sleazy 70's... which is, in light of similarly minded films of the same era, really quite poor.
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