Borowczyk was a crazed visionary wild man of cinema but cinema needs crazed visionary wild men.
This is a mediæval story. It is not merely a story set in mediæval times. Borowczyk is trying to tell a truly mediæval story. He goes to great lengths to let us know that this is a society which is radically alien. This is a feudal society. All of the rules are different. Borowczyk’s wildly unconventional approach to filmmaking reinforces this feeling of alienness.
Blanche is the much younger wife of an old and ailing feudal lord. Also living in the castle is the lord’s son Nicolas. Perhaps Nicolas and his stepmother are a bit too close. In fact they’re in love.
Things come to a head when the King arrives for a brief stay, accompanied by his page Bartolomeo.
Bartolomeo is very much a ladies’ man and immediately sets to work on the project of seducing Blanche. The King has the same object in mind.
So three men want to get Blanche into bed. Maybe Nicolas has already done so, or maybe not. Blanche is certainly determined not to surrender her honour to either the King of Bartolomeo.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you have done something or not. What matters is the suspicion. Blanche’s husband claims to have absolute confidence in her fidelity but he is soon insane with jealousy. He is convinced that she is being unfaithful, but with whom? The King cannot even entertain the idea that she might betray him with her son.
Of course it will all end badly. Nobody believes anyone else, whether they happen to be telling the truth lying.
It would be a mistake to try to view this story through the lens of today’s ideologies. It would be a particularly serious mistake to try to see it as a feminist film. This is the Middle Ages. These people have their own notions of honour and morality which are totally foreign to us. They often behave badly but it is the moral rules of their own time that they are breaking, not our modern moral rules.
What matters is not the story but the way Borowczyk tells it. He doesn’t want us to think that we have entered this alien world. We have not, because we cannot. We can only observe.
Borowczyk began his career making animated movies. My impression is that he didn’t have a clue how to make live-action films. So he just invented his own bizarre idiosyncratic approach. Which is why his movies are so interesting. They ignore all the accepted rules of movie-making.
In any movie of course the viewer is an outside observer. Borowczyk really makes this particularly obvious. But it’s not like we’re watching actors on a stage. It’s more like we’re watching a marionette theatre. Or a painting. But we never feel as if we’re entering the world of the painting. We are outside looking in. Everything is rather two-dimensional. Borowczyk based his visual scheme for the movie on mediæval paintings and architecture.
His shot compositions are odd. For want of a better word I’d describe them as architectural. Borowczyk loves doors. And windows. And cabinets and boxes. And little architectural nooks. Doors constantly opening and closing. Characters framed within doorways. Lots of frames within frames. Doors can reveal or they can conceal. They can open to us or they can enclose us. There are lots of enclosures here (including an obviously symbolic white dove enclosed in a cage). We see the King reading in bed, behind a screen. It’s as if he’s enclosed in a box.
There are touches of absurdism and even surrealism but the tone is always sombre. And the feel is always decidedly strange. There’s a strong sense of doom.
I don’t think Borowczyk ever wanted conventionally good acting performances from his casts and if the performances here are artificial that is undoubtedly what he wanted. His wife Ligia Branice plays Blanche. Her performance is odd but thats what Borowczyk wanted.
It’s perhaps slightly reminiscent of Pasolini’s Medea which also emphasis the alienness of the past and also has a distinctive visual style. For all its bizarreness (and it’s very bizarre) I was mesmerised by Blanche. Highly recommended, if you don’t mind very arty very odd movies.
The Arrow Academy Blu-Ray looks great (the colours were intended to be subdued) and there are plenty of extras. I've also reviewed Borowczyk's Immoral Tales (1973) and his truly bizarre The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne (1981).
