Love Rites [Blu-ray]

Director: Walerian Borowczyk Walerian Borowczyk

Overview

Hugo Arnold (Mathieu Carrière) is a young hedonist who meets actress and prostitute Miriam Gwen (Marina Pierro) in this erotic and violent drama. After heavy petting and foreplay throughout the Paris subway and a church, she takes him to an apartment for the sexual favors she has promised. Hugo is subjected to a humiliating emasculation and wanders dazed on the banks of the Seine following his ordeal. A young woman emerging from the river after swimming stabs herself to death, and the hapless Hugo is blamed for her murder. Josy Bernard also co-stars with Isabelle Tinard.

Product Details

Release Date:	08/31/2021
UPC:	0738329255305
Original Release:	1989
Rating:	NR
Source:	Kino Classics
Language:	English
Time:	1:40:00
Sales rank:	22,132

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Marina Pierro	Miriam Gwen
Mathieu Carrière	Hugo Arnoold
Josy Bernard	Meriem
Isabelle Tinard	Nora Nix
Mathieu Carriere	Actor

Technical Credits

Walerian Borowczyk

Walerian Borowczyk	Screenwriter,Director
Philippe Guez	Producer
Alain Sarde	Executive Producer

Editorial Reviews

The last feature film for Polish director Walerian Borowczyk, Love Rites is packaged and advertised with garish graphics of a nude female stroked with razor-tipped fingers, a bit of desperate fraudulence that is destined to attract the wrong audience. Despite an erotic theme and a violent climax, not enough happens for Love Rites to rank as the gore-soaked pornography it is presented to be. Instead, Borowczyk follows a day-long seduction between two strangers in which endless discussions of philosophical and psychological matters are framed with soft-focus religious imagery and paced like a half-remembered dream. The sophistication suits a film based on a book by French surrealist author Andre Pieyre DeMandiargues, but it's a sluggish journey and the principal players are blank-faced and uninteresting. Borowczyk was more successful at crossing explicit sexuality with arthouse tendencies in earlier curiosities such as La Bête and Immoral Tales.

All Movie Guide - Fred Beldin