An affectionate sketch of the voluptuous erotic (of course!), animist pastels by Bona de Mandiargues, wife of the surrealist writer who narrates the erotica collage A Private Collection. Bona meets Boro!
Exquisite in both design and composition, Blanche sees Walerian Borowczyk utilize his fine arts background to draw from the symbolic effects of Medieval art. Rich in decorative and pastoral detail, the film proved a key inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Borowczyk is most famous for his approach of filming provocative material with “inappropriate” style. While that accusation would later be made against sex in his films, this also can be seen here in his animation of camp experience. Terry Gilliam named it one of the best animated films of all time!
Walerian Borowczyk’s final film is relatively more sexually restrained than the dizzyingly pink heights of his late 60s and 70s cinema. Had he mellowed with age? Nonetheless, Boro’s adaptation of André Pieyre de Mandiargues’s novel still plunges into contemporary sexual mores with gleeful abandon.
After working in shorts for a decade, Borowczyk finally leapt to his feature film debut while retaining all the originality of his bizarre and inventive animation (with touches of color-swathed live action!). The ’60s featured many unconventional portraits of marriage but none so strange as this!
