A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Saturday, September 6, 2025

La Marge (Walerian Borowczyk, 1976)

Sylvia Kristel and Joe Dallesandro in La Marge

Cast: Sylvia Kristel, Joe Dallesandro, André Falcon, Mireille Audibert, Denis Manuel, Dominique Marcas, Norma Picadilly, Camille Larivière, Luz Laurent, Louise Chevalier, Karin Albin. Screenplay: Walerian Borowczyk, based on a novel by André Piyere de Mandriargues. Cinematography: Bernard Daillencourt. Production design: Jacques D'Ovidio. Film editing: Louisette Hautecoeur. 

Positing a connection between grief and sex, Walerian Borowczyk's La Marge tries to be more than just soft-core porn filtered through an exquisite sensibility. It fails, but honorably. What it needs is a more nuanced actor than Joe Dallesandro in the lead, greater narrative clarity, and an avoidance of symbolic clichés like the dwarf who marks the fringes of a fragmented reality. It overreaches just enough to be memorable but not to avoid ridicule. 

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