The filmmaker and animator Walerian Borowczyk has been described as "a genius who happened to be a pornographer". This phrase definitely piques the interest of those jaded smut viewers who are tired of seeing the same thing over and over. But is it accurate?
"Behind Convent Walls" is definitely more arthouse than softcore, despite its near constant parade of naked nuns. It doesn't even try to have anything like a plot, nor characters, things we associate with mainstream films, and even mainstream pornography. Rather its English title is brilliantly descriptive: Borowczyk lifts the lid, or in this case the wall, behind a convent some hundred years before, to show all the seamy behaviour going on there.
Apparently it's also not even that unrealistic. Obviously a porno flick throws any pretence to verisimilitude out the window in favour of sex. But I have heard that in a lot of cases young women were given to a nunnery by poor families not so that they could live a life of religious austerity, but so that they could enjoy privilege they wouldn't otherwise have. One of the nuns is heavily pregnant, another masturbates with a dildo, another attempts to have sex with her violin. The mother superior isn't that bothered.
The problem with the movie, though, is that it's not interesting. You get tired of this debauchery pretty quickly. There's no eroticism, and it's not particularly shocking. Just tedious. Some kind of a story would have helped.
Is Borowczyk a genius? It's hard to tell. The fact that he doesn't go straight to smut, and seems to have other things on his mind, might distinguish him from all the other exploitation filmmakers out there. But whatever this conceit was didn't add up to an interesting movie.
"Behind Convent Walls" is definitely more arthouse than softcore, despite its near constant parade of naked nuns. It doesn't even try to have anything like a plot, nor characters, things we associate with mainstream films, and even mainstream pornography. Rather its English title is brilliantly descriptive: Borowczyk lifts the lid, or in this case the wall, behind a convent some hundred years before, to show all the seamy behaviour going on there.
Apparently it's also not even that unrealistic. Obviously a porno flick throws any pretence to verisimilitude out the window in favour of sex. But I have heard that in a lot of cases young women were given to a nunnery by poor families not so that they could live a life of religious austerity, but so that they could enjoy privilege they wouldn't otherwise have. One of the nuns is heavily pregnant, another masturbates with a dildo, another attempts to have sex with her violin. The mother superior isn't that bothered.
The problem with the movie, though, is that it's not interesting. You get tired of this debauchery pretty quickly. There's no eroticism, and it's not particularly shocking. Just tedious. Some kind of a story would have helped.
Is Borowczyk a genius? It's hard to tell. The fact that he doesn't go straight to smut, and seems to have other things on his mind, might distinguish him from all the other exploitation filmmakers out there. But whatever this conceit was didn't add up to an interesting movie.