La bête

Plot synopsis:
Businessman Philip Broadhurst dies and leaves his estate to his daughter, Lucy, on the condition that, within six months of his death, she marries Mathurin, the Marquis Pierre de l'Esperance's son, and be married by Cardinal Joseph do Balo, the brother of Pierre's uncle, the crippled Duc Rammaendelo de Balo, who shares their crumbling farmhouse with Pierre's daughter Clarisse, and their servant Ifany.
Mathurin, who manages the family horse-breeding business, is dim-witted and deformed, and has never been baptized. Pierre summons the local priest to the house for the baptism, but Pierre, by promising the priest repairs to his church and a new bell, performs the ritual himself so that the priest doesn't find out the truth about Mathurin.
Lucy and her aunt, Virginia, are driven by their chauffeur towards the farm but their way is blocked by a fallen tree. They find a back route to the house at a back door to the house, where Lucy asks Rammaendelo about rumors. Rammaendelo, who is not in favor of the marriage because he is dependent on Mathurin to look after him, shows her a book that describes the beautiful Romilda's fight with a beast in the local forest 200 years ago. Lucy comes across several drawings depicting bestiality, and becomes sexually excited at the thought of her impending marriage, even though she has never met Mathurin.
Pierre blackmails Rammaendelo into persuading his brother to perform the marriage by telling him that he has proof that Rammaendelo poisoned his wife. Rammaendelo is unable to get through to the Cardinal on the telephone, so Pierre sends a telegram, assuring him that Mathurin has been baptized and urging him to attend this evening.
Everyone assembles for dinner, and Mathurin's uncouth manners become apparent. Lucy and her aunt try to leave, but are persuaded to stay. Everyone having drunk too much wine, most of the assembly fall asleep while waiting up for the Cardinal. Lucy retires to her room, undresses, puts on her thin wedding dress, and dreams that she is Romilda, playing a harpsichord. Seeing a lamb straying into the forest, she chases after it to find that it has been torn apart by a black hairy beast.
Pierre overhears Rammaendelo on the telephone to the Cardinal trying to dissuade him from performing the marriage. Angrily interrupting the conversation, Pierre slits Rammaendelo's throat with a razor and tears the phone out of the wall. In the ensuing comic dream sequence, the beast with a large visible erection chases Lucy through the forest. She loses most of her clothing in the process and ends up hanging by her arms from a branch, and the beast licks her and masturbates. Lucy wakes in a sweat. Was it just a dream? She tiptoes to Mathurin's room but he is asleep, fully clothed, on his bed. Lucy returns to her room, masturbates, and dreams that the beast is copulating with her. She wakes again and is convinced that Mathurin must have visited her. She visits his room again but he is still sleeping soundly.
Lucy returns to her dream. The beast continues to masturbate and Lucy rubs his ejaculate all over herself. Eventually the beast dies of exhaustion. Lucy wakes and walks into Mathurin's room to find him dead on the floor. She runs naked through the house screaming, and everyone runs to her aid. Virginia examines Mathurin's body and discovers that a plaster cast on his arm is concealing a claw for a hand. Pulling his clothes off reveals that he is covered in thick black hair and has a tail. They run out of the house in terror as the Cardinal arrives. Virginia comforts the terrified Lucy as they speed away in the car, and Lucy dreams that she is naked in the forest again, burying the beast.

Tags: pornographic, psychedelic, satire

Review:
Those who are used to Borowczyk's hothouse mise-en-scene will know what to expect as the director characteristically combines matter of fact staging with lustful fantasy, in a way that only a east european sensibility can carry off.'The Beast' appeared approximately half way in a career spanning art house successes such as 'Blanche' (1971) to the creative nadir of 'Emmanuelle 5' (1987).
Borowczyk's heroines, when apart from their lovers, typically pleasure themselves quietly in chambers, as in the 'cucumber' scene in Contes Immoraux/Immoral Tales' (1974)(A film in which the content of the flashback in here was originally to have appeared).
Standing out without apology, the real concerns here are like the phallic column-stump prominent in the chateau grounds, the images remaining with the viewer after the film is finished exactly those which the director intended  the irrational and sexual.Although nominally set in the twentieth century, the action of the film could with little difficulty be transposed to earlier times - the middle ages say, where the director has found inspiration before.
If, like me, you like your films to be unique, and unlike the majority of other movies, then I wholly recommend that you check out The Beast.
The film is a grotesque, erotic, fantasy fairytale that centres around a mythological 'Beast' that is rumoured to wander the grounds of a French mansion and lusts after women.
Like other films that handle a taboo subject at their centre, The Beast could have gone around it, and made us use our imagination to fill in the gaps, but Borowczyk didn't do that, and he is brave in that respect, especially as making a film like this will leave him open to all kinds of criticisms, but the fact that he went ahead with it, in my view, means a big thumbs up for the guy.The film starts off with a sequence that sees a randy male horse mount a female.
The scenes which see the beast mate with the woman are gratuitous and shocking, and are bound to offend many people (hence the reason it was banned for over 20 years), but these scenes are not merely an excuse for Borowczyk to shock the viewer; this film has a defining point.
The film has strong themes of the age-old story of 'beauty and beast' weaved into it, and overall this is a shockingly morbid tale of lust, but not without a moral.Many criticise the scenes around the film's shocking sex sequences for being boring, but these scenes are important to the film's story.
Without these scenes, we wouldn't get to know the characters or the story of the beast, and, most importantly; the story of 'beauty and the beast' would not be able to have it's horrifying conclusion dealt to the audience, and as that is one of the key elements of the film; it would be a real shame.
Besides that, Borowczyk keeps his audience entertained through these scenes, not with shocks, but with dialogue and the upper class persona of the family, along with the beautiful shots of the mansion's ground would not be seen, and therefore the stark contrast between that and the events later on in the film would not exist either.Overall, The Beast is a shocking film.
OK...this one's a weirdy....Honestly, I can't tell you all the inner plot-points of THE BEAST, cuz I started losing interest when nothing happened during the first 45 or more minutes - but just wait, it definitely does "pick up"...The plot involves something about a monster in the woods that some French aristocrat chick screwed back in the day.
Eventually the chick starts to enjoy the beast's "attention" which results in some pretty novel simulated sex scenes, including an unnervingly erotic foot masturbation scene where the woman jerks the beast off with her feet while the monster shoots more huge loads everywhere (yeah, I've got a twisted foot-fetish - so sue me....)...The whole film is told in flashbacks and long-winded dialog scenes that tended to be a bit tedious.
I have to honestly say, that if it weren't for the graphic scenes of the BEAST spackling all over the willing maiden, this film would have been a real bore - that is unless you like dull dialog and some graphic horse sex (the beginning has a VERY up-close and personal scene of two horses boning, including a pulsating and spunk covered female horse vagina...YUM!!!).
"La Bête" by Walerian Borowczyk is based on the short story "Lokis" written by Prosper Merimée.Lucy Broadhurst(Lisabeth Hummel),an American heiress betrothed to the son of an impoverished Marquis,arrives at the family's crumbling château and learns of a mythical ursine beast purported to prowl the nearby forest.It is fabled that a former lady of the house(Sirpa Lane)once engaged in perverse sex with the creature and Lucy finds herself consumed by dreams of the incident.
"The Beast" is an art-house mix of surreal horror,explicit sleaze and porno.There's implied bestiality,assault and perversion in the priesthood,copious fake ejaculate smeared on bared breasts,masturbation with a rose and, most graphic of all,the eponymous beast toying with incredibly big phallus.Still this genuinely erotic film is wonderfully photographed and tasteless.The women here are stunningly beautiful and they are naked most of the time.Overall "La Bête" is a visual feast.Whether it be from the fetishistic attention to detail,or the visual motifs pregnant with information,Borowczyk's masterpiece should be watched with care and attention.A must-see for fans of European cult cinema..
For anyone who has only seen Disney Productions beautifully animated version of 'Beauty & The Beast', or even Jean Cocteau's surreal fairy tale vision will be quite taken aback by this 1975 French (but with a director from Poland) version.
From the opening credits, to the very end, it's a nearly non stop erotic fun house ride, with some VERY explicit & graphic sexual content (hence the film's X rating in the U.S. in it's initial run,which is now unrated).
Of course, as it is freely based on the classic fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast, a personal favorite of mine, it tells the story of a girl's sexual awakening over a dream about a duchess being chased by a whatever-the-hell-that-thing-was-like beast with an enormous erection and a substantial amount of ejaculation.
The innocence of the young bride shines through and no one knows what can happen and wake up inside the walls of the big and beautiful French mansion, with all its humans and animals, and a mysterious "la bête" that turns out to be something that the characters, nor most of the film's audience, could have never imagined to be real and (in front of) them.The film is about the same theme as Canadian David Cronenberg's debyt feature Shivers (1975), which happens inside a huge luxury building in which destructive and gory parasites spread from human to human by sexual contact and make people act furiously and violently in their lust for pleasure and fulfilment of instincts.
The film opens greatly, and very shockingly for most hypocritic attitudes, showing a horny male horse raging in fury as he waits to get inside the mare and continue the race, but the rage and visible lust we see from his eyes and violent movements are the key elements of that beginning and why it is there, not the close-ups of organs as could be so easily claimed.
The power of the instinct makes an animal a beast.After the memorable beginning, the characters get introduced, and the film fantastically has all the necessary age groups inside it from the little innocent children waiting to grow up and develop to their blossom, to the adults and elders that all represent their own part of the lifespan, creating the face of human life on screen.
The images are exciting in her dream and also eventually inside the dream for the dream's (more) human character, and Borowczyk forces us to admit it with the images that are so close to a "normal" sexual act between a man and a female, which is a beautiful thing and expression of love, another human need.
It looked great, but once the thrill had been spent even the twist ending didn't do much to save it.The film's background story says it all: Director films about 25 minutes of borderline hardcore fake bestial sex for another movie, is informed the footage will not be appropriate, sets it aside, waits two or three years for a smattering of critical acclaim to build up, then constructs an entire feature around that 25 minutes, filming roughly 70 minutes of otherwise unrelated, excruciatingly boring footage and inserting the 25 minute chunk in as a dream sequence.
The problem is that most people will not be able to separate out the two aspects of the movie and will be lining up to give it Oscars because of it's noble message -- not because it is a particularly good or original movie.While it may seem like an odd parallel, I see one with THE BEAST: How can anyone not see the basic beauty of nature in the sight of two horses mating?
And who cannot see the logical culmination of the repressed sexuality from fairy tales in the film's explosive set-piece where Beauty and the Beast finally do the nasty?
Somehow I managed to miss both points, and am delighted that I have seen this film so that I can trash it as being what it really is: 25 minutes or so of eye opening over the top adult fairy tale imagery surrounded by 70 minutes of skull drainingly boring artsy-fartsy Euro Trash dreck about some guy getting a haircut, and a great ending.
Once the sex and nudity begins, it is a nonstop sequence involving masturbation, a looooooooong flashback to an alleged 'beauty and the beast' encounter, and a naked woman running around the mansion (nobody, even her supposedly protective Aunt, seems to even think of putting some clothes on her!).
(One of the materials she (and we) are exposed to is the opening of the film which features a horse erection.) He ejaculates to death and our ancient beauty covers him with leaves and runs home, presumably impregnated, producing the groom of the modern story.But believe me, except for a very few elements, the recounting of it has more value than its cinematic expression.
the first hour carries on and you don't know what is going on, lots of sex scenes and given that its the 1970s man these girls are good looking.
well rape is not the word because the last half an hour of the film is about her and the beast having lots of sex and it shows the male organ of the beast if you know what i mean and the fact that it shows the beast ejeculating is pretty sick but that is what its all about.
In fact, I fell asleep at about the 40 minute mark and forced myself to finish it the next night.We finally get the good stuff when a girl (who knows who she is, or who anyone is in this movie) has a dream about a Victorian-era gal being ravaged by a beast-thing in the forest.
If you want to be appalled and amused at the same time however, and have a taste for the extreme, watch the film's opening scene {it is sort of relevant], than fast forward to just past the hour mark and watch the rest..
That said, it does have a high degree of shock value (especially if you're used to British censorship, and have a reasonable imagination), so for odd people like me who will happily watch a film simply in order to be amazed and revolted, it's worth seeing.
I wasn't at all offended by the explicit content-I'm far too jaded for that-but I did find The Beast, for the most part, to be extremely tiresome.Initially, it appears that director Borowczyk is going for all-out perversion, with his opening graphic scenes of horse copulation, but what follows is primarily dull nonsense concerning the preparation for the impending marriage of Mathurin de l'Esperance (Pierre Benedetti) to virginal Lucy Broadhurst (Lisbeth Hummel), and the problems in getting Cardinal Joseph de Balo (Jean Martinelli) to conduct the ceremony.
This goes on for what seems like an eternity, with only the occasional spot of nudity and sex to prevent the viewer from dozing off..The film's most notorious scene comes at just over an hour into the film: a young woman is pursued by the beast, who tears off her clothes and has sex with her.
Soon a variety of sexual perversions come to light when the young lady visits the man before their wedding.Walerian Borowczyk's work has always been quite controversial and it strike a certain core among film buffs.
I mean, the final thirty-minutes is pure perversion and features all sorts of scenes where the Beast "gets off" on a woman he has captured in the woods.
THE BEAST is unlike any other film you've seen, that's for sure, and that's the one thing that keeps it somewhat watchable..
The daughter and her aunt then travel out to the French countryside to meet with the family, unaware that a mysterious 'beast' is stalking the vicinity.Many felt the film went over the top with its sex scenes, leading to its withdrawal from film for several years.
Notorious Borowczyk film, often dubbed 'art porn'; its infamous reputation is derived from prolonged scenes in the woods where the beast graphically despoils the maiden.
It's more of the parody on all genres it touches or mentions even though it's got some shocking moments in all departments that sure will stay in your memory.The long (way too long) scene between an Aristocratic young woman and the supposedly horrifying but the most laughable I've ever seen in the movies creature with truly impressive...well anatomy, is set to the clavichord music of Scarlatti and is hysterical.
This way, the whole film lasts about 35 minutes, almost an hour shorter than the running time, and you get to see the hilarious Beast versus Babe scenes.
Almost every other film with this kind of sexual scenes always becomes rated X, and so seen as a pornographic movie.
In terms of going from zero to one-hundred in terms of plot-escalation, La Bête takes the cake with positioning itself like an ordinary, albeit slightly off-kilter, melodrama about an arranged relationship in a close-knit family, before becoming a zoophiliac's ultimate cinematic desire.The story opens following the death of a businessman named Philip Broadhurst, who leaves his estate to his daughter Lucy (Lisbeth Hummel) with the only condition being that she be married to a man named Mathurin (Pierre Benedetti) by the brother of Pierre's uncle within the next six months.
Without giving too much away, for much of the final thirty minutes of this film need be experienced, the film involves a dark, twisted dream sequence (or maybe not) of Lucy's intimate, sexual relationship with the aforementioned beast.Borowczyk doesn't hold back in what he wants the audience to see in La Bête, so much so that he's willing to show us a bear ejaculating and performing cunnilingus on Lucy, resulting in Lucy enduring a series of bloody scratches.
Here's a curio: a film that takes as its basis not so much Beauty and the Beast (though if you want to read into it that way have at it), but, well, a kind of bestiality.
I say 'kind-of' since I'm not totally sure still what the director, Walerian Borowczyk, was really getting at with his story of a woman who comes to a French villa and is set to marry a man, only to have (at least to her) smoking-hot fantasies of a woman getting raped by some beast in the woods fully sexually aroused.
And meanwhile a woman with two kids that aren't really hers drifts in and out of the house having all-too-brief sex with the black servant.Did Borowczyk really want to set out to make an actual story here with Lucy Broadhurst and her hunger for the "beast", or did he want to make a story out of the corruption and deceit at the house with the centuries-old de l'Esperance?
The perversity level is then ratcheted up during the film with memorable scenes including a female masturbation sequence that brings a new meaning to the term `green fingers' and unbelievably twisted `beast'-woman `romp'.
lighting OK.i still wouldn't recommend this to anyone else than maybe a film-student.the movie does not contain music, and the horses having sex don't make it a good one either.
Now my friends, films like "La Bête" (aka "The Beast" or "O Monstro")only can be done in the old continent :),in this film we see all: horses dirty sex, nymphomaniac kind off gorilla, non sense dialogs, etc, etc, etc...
I could just imagine director Walerian Borowczyk giggling behind the camera at how his film skewers and jabs Catholicism(..preferably priests, hinting at their lascivious secrets)and graphic displays of bestiality with this hairy beast banging a duchess in the dreams of a wealthy heiress, Lucy Broadhurst(Lisbeth Hummel).
Lucy, having the dream about this encounter, gets so worked up she wishes to have sexual intercourse with the man she plans to wed, a pagan named Mathurin(Pierre Benedetti) whose "true nature" will soon be revealed at the end after a tragedy opens up a secret that has plagued the I'Esperance family for two centuries.
The fact that beastiality (of sorts) is one of the film's central themes did certainly not help it with the censors, but it made it highly controversial and therefore known to a wider audience.Pierre de l'Esperance (Guy Tréjan), the head of a French aristocratic family, has arranged for his somewhat demented son Mathurin (Pierre Benedetti) to marry Lucy Broadhurst (Lisbeth Hummel), the young and beautiful daughter of a wealthy English family.
She combines in her mind a family story of an 18th-century ancestor, a beautiful woman, who encountered a beast in the forest, and he had his way with her, with her recent memory of the horse's enormous penis.