The Beast (1975)

REVIEW
In what must easily be one of the DVD industry’s most unpredictably, and perhaps inexplicably, elaborate packages in the history of the format, the 1975 French sexploitation endeavor The Beast (La Bete) has been reissued in a three-disc (!) special edition package featuring two different versions of the feature film, as well as two hours of supplementary material including interviews and original behind-the-scenes footage. Sometimes it makes one wonder what the world is coming to, doesn’t it? For those of you unfamiliar with the slight charms of this minor cult favorite, Beast is Polish-born director Walerian Borowczyk’s eye-opening interpretation of the Beauty and the Beast tale, notorious for its unabashed emphasis on the most explicit sexual elements of the oft-told yarn: picture a cross between Angela Carter’s fiction, Jan Svankmajer’s surrealist cinema, and Andrew Blake’s pornography, and you’d have some indication of what’s in store. The story centers on a young American woman and her aunt who have traveled to a French estate, presided over by a decaying aristocratic family who are desperate to arrange a marriage between their strange son and the American girl. The motives behind the French clan’s eagerness to marry off their son shortly become apparent (well, actually, most viewers who make it through the talkfest that comprises the first hour of this film would likely argue, “not shortly enough”), as the son’s condition is related to an amorous beast that roamed the countryside in the 18th century and impregnated the son’s ancestress, thereby triggering a family curse. Opening with graphic footage of equine copulation and climaxing (ahem…) with lengthy sequences of women engaging in sexual escapades with the film’s eponymous beast creature – complete with “money shots” involving the bestial figure’s enormous artificial phallus - The Beast is, to put it mildly, unashamed of its emphasis on sexuality, and indeed, its unflinching exploration of one of cinema’s last remaining taboos, bestiality. But those expecting a non-stop cinematic sex-fest should be aware that Borowczyk – who began as an animator, which might account for the somewhat static, formal nature of his mise en scene – adopts a stately, dry approach to the proceedings for much of the running time, and, as mentioned, the first two-thirds of the film may prove overly leisurely paced for some viewers (the disc offers the option of viewing the film in dubbed English or French with English subtitles; the film flows considerably more smoothly if you select the latter viewing mode). But the director (taken quite seriously in Europe, even as his career later descended into very pedestrian sexploitation) does lend a distinctly dreamlike and often erotic tone to even the expositional material – and it would be difficult to argue that the final third of the film certainly pays off for those seeking peculiar, unique cinematic thrills. The disc set also comes accompanied by a 52-page booklet, the photographic content of which must be seen to be believed…

(Phrases in red refer to the out-of-print box set; the shorter single-disc version of the film is still available)