Love Rites, Walerian Borowcyzk’s artsmut Brief Encounter from a short story by surrealist André Pieyre de Mandlargues, gets rolling with a chance frottage on the Paris Metro between bourgeoisie Hugo (the pert, dry, and very bland Mathieu Carrière) and streetwalker Miriam (Marina Pierro). She smoothes her lipstick over her mouth with a lively, rolled tongue; he brushes her thigh. Flirtation becomes conversation, and for a second, as these characters reveal life stories from opposite train platforms, cars flickering between them, the movie lifts off to an odd, engaging improbability, like something out of top-drawer Bertrand Blier. But the obtuseness of their rapport keeps up, fizzling flat when the principles are side-by-side. Hugo and Miriam talk past one another right across the city, through a rote sex scene, a perverse power role flip-flop—she rakes him with dagger-like nail extensions in a scene of unconvincing violence—and a rather uninspired, classically arthouse head-scratcher finale.

Italian actress Pierro (this was her fifth outing with Borowcyzk, though Jean Rollin’s Living Dead Girl is her shot at immortality) is consistently the most—often only—compelling image that the film has to offer; her odd, symmetrical beauty is narcotic where the rest of Love Rites is narcoleptic—or hypnotic, if you prefer. But if you can keep a straight face through Jean Négroni’s coital play-by-play, by turns lip-smacking and ontological, there is something pleasantly soporific about these soft-focus proceedings, though I say this as one who ranks Jess Franco’s Female Vampire the quintessence of the undervalued asleep-on-the-couch genre. Borowcyzk’s movie lets its attention wander plenty, leaving the narrative to go slack while following tangential objects, quotidian street scenes, an ex-con here, a pigeon there—why not?—and then a shutterbug Japanese tourist who occupies an alarming amount of screen time and speaks with a bizarre, sped-up voice, in a true “What the fuck?” moment.

Cult Epics, who recently gave Borowczyk’s great, gonzo La Bête a rather excessive three-disc treatment, load Love Rites with no excess of special features (Ooh, a photo gallery! Has anyone ever browsed one of these things?). Aside from that we get a double-sided presentation that offers alternate “Director’s Cut” and “complete” versions of the film (the difference in running time is about 10 minutes, the difference in content, negligible—Borowcyzk just whittles down the digressions), a fair-to-middling 1.66:1 transfer with clean sound, and liner notes by the enigmatic and appropriately Eurotrash-sounding Rayo Casablanco. The insert epitomizes the pitfalls of most writing from over-defensive acolytes of art-exploitation hybrids (Borowcyzk, Rollin, Andrzej Zulawski, et al), who always seem over-inclined to hitch their subject to some recognized artist or manifesto (De Sade, Artaud, The Story of O) in a bid for legitimacy. So we learn that “Like George Bataille, the father of postmodernism (?), Borowczyk incorporates sex into his work in an unflinching light. Sadly, this has led his work to be misconstrued as ‘pornographic.’” Sad only if you assume pornographic is a pejorative, and if you’ve got a monster chip on your shoulder about justifying your prurient tastes with a patina of pseudo-intellectuality. But then that’s a rather moot point—as porn, art, or erotica, Love Rites is decidedly minor.
—NICK PINKERTON