The film certainly has the feel of a smaller tale padded out – the beast sequence is not tied to anything else, nor made clear whether it is just Lisbeth Hummel’s sexual fantasy or a flashback to Romilda in the past. The Beast began life as an episode of Borowczyk’s erotic anthology Immoral Tales but Borowcyzk expanded the film out on its own after audiences were purportedly outraged by the suggestions of bestiality. Borowczyk’s films were always more than dirty romps – they fell somewhere between the Provencal French comedy and the iconoclasm and thwarted desire of Luis Buñuel around the period of Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) and Belle de Jour (1967). His work tapered off beyond the mid-80s amid the likes of the tawdry Emmanuelle V (1987), but there is a small cult that centres around Walerian Borowczyk’s films. Borowczyk became a live-action director with erotic films such as Goto, Island of Love (1968), Blanche (1971), Immoral Tales (1974), The Story of a Sin (1975), The Streetwalker (1976), Behind Convent Walls (1977), Lulu (1980), Dr Jekyll and His Women (1981) and The Art of Love (1983).
The Polish-born but French-based Borowczyk emerged with a series of acclaimed (and still unavailable on video) animated short films in the 1960s, but it was his erotica that gained Borowcyzk critical semi-respectability. One struggles to think of any other erotic director whose works received film festival releases, for instance.
Walerian Borowcyzk was for a brief time one of the most respectable directors of erotica.