The Margin (1976) User Reviews (9)

An unconscious parody of "The Blue Angel" and its ilk

[melvelvit-1 · 5/10 · 10 July 2014]

The once-in-a-lifetime teaming of two '70s pop culture icons, Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro and Sylvia "Emmanuelle" Kristel, is worth the price of admission alone and the fact it's an awful (albeit awful pretty) movie doesn't hurt, either. It fancies itself a European art house film and even tries to go Bertolucci's LAST TANGO IN Paris one better by laying on the kinkiness with a trowel but the results are more laughable than erotic.

"Little Joe" plays Sigimond Pons, a man who seemingly has it all: a successful career, a gorgeous wife, an adorable son, and a beautiful home with live-in help. He and his wife vow never to betray each other but there's trouble in paradise as soon as his boss sends him to Paris for a week. Once there, Siggie's dark side emerges and he begins leaving his hotel at night to prowl the city's red light district looking for ...something.

He finds it when he locks eyes with Diana (Sylvia Kristel), a prostitute he encounters in a bizarre hotel-cum-brothel. Grabbing his crotch, she leads him upstairs to a toilette and from this point on, the film becomes a kaleidoscope of images meant to convey sexual decadence: lots of red rooms and lipstick, black feathers, panties, and hose (even a black midget) with a little voyeurism and homosexuality thrown in, all in an attempt to make Paris seem like Sodom. Sigimond gets his shirt ripped off and his nipples twisted while getting a hummer before taking Diana from behind and licking her feet in what looks to be a send up of THE NIGHT PORTER and before you know it, he's besotted. Then there's the egg episode; during a bout of lovemaking, Siggie pulls an egg out of a paper bag and torments Diana with it, rolling it all over her body and I was nearly on the edge of my seat wondering where that egg was gonna end up (I needn't have worried, tho -it's softcore, after all). Diana also performs a neat party trick by using her stomach muscles to launch the egg from navel to bush and makes him pay extra for mussing up her hair.

The story gains momentum as Sigimond spirals downward and, throwing caution to the wind, he pursues Diana even after receiving a letter telling him his son has drowned in the family pool and his wife threw herself out the window. Nothing can break the hold this hooker has over his libido, however, and it doesn't take rocket science to figure out the chances of a happy ending are slim to none...

Watching STREETWALKER was a very discombobulating experience; I got to bask in a film that's lovingly lensed while being pummeled by pretentiousness and beaten with blatant symbolism at every turn from Siggie and his wife running for cover as a thunderstorm looms on the horizon to the soundtrack blaring "I'm Not In Love" when Diana has sex. Using dairy products as sex aids was nothing new in the free-wheeling '70s, I know, but did Borowczyk think this film would do for Joe and the egg what butter did for Brando in LAST TANGO?? There's no other explanation.

The entire "affair" would have played much better as a black comedy and it's too bad "Little Joe" didn't make this for director Paul Morrissey and the Warhol gang since it could have been a wicked send-up of Josef von Sternberg's THE BLUE ANGEL. In any event, it's a goldmine of unintentional humor so the end result's the same, I suppose. There's a lot less to this than meets the eye and I didn't drive myself nuts wondering what it all meant -it was hard enough just trying to recall who performed those U.S. pop rock tunes on the soundtrack. If you'd like seeing a pair of somnambulistic sex stars have softcore sex in soft focus and enjoy bad movies with good intentions, I say "Don't miss it" but otherwise, "You've been warned".

Cult director Borowczyk went on to make EMMANUELLE 5 a decade later and although it didn't star Sylvia Kristel (unfortunately), the egg made another cameo appearance and Variety called the film an "unconscious parody". It's nice to know Mr. B hadn't lost the magic touch.

Evocative Soundtrack

[robjam · 2 March 2004]

Despite the undoubted shortcomings of this movie, the soundtrack is evocative and memorable, if not haunting, with its blend of contemporary rock and sentimental chanson. Kristel emerges as the better actor with Dallesandro never appearing entirely comfortable (although maybe he isn't supposed to).

It also features a rare appearance of the legendary Citroen SM. Notwithstanding, this is a moral little tale with some beautiful images (no, not just the nudes). There is a beginning, a middle and an end (of sorts).

It deserves a much wider audience than its art-house release in the UK produced. Possibly Walerian Borowczyk's magnum opus.

Mediocre soft porn

[grybop · 3/10 · 21 July 2001]

A sex scene using Pink Floyd's "Shine on you crazy diamond" as soundtrack is one of the very few original things in this movie. But apart from that, little is to be remembered from this mediocre soft porn film.

Joe Dalessandro and Sylvia Krystel were top sex symbols at the time "La marge" was made; the former still had the infamous Warhol trilogy stamped all over him , while the latter had found stardom a couple of years earlier with the legendary "Emanuelle". I guess it was inevitable that the "talents" of these two were combined in one movie, possibly having their strip-in-every-other-scene fame in mind. And while Krystel seems to be laid back in a territory she is familiar with, Dalessandro is obviously nervous at times, the reason probably being that he CANNOT speak french! Almost each time he speaks, the camera avoids shooting his face, making us seriously think if it is his voice that is heard!

Too bad that such an interesting storyline is wasted on consequent, vaguely linked to each other, sex scenes.

3

Euro-chic at its best

[peter-jansens-bio · 7/10 · 27 June 2015]

There is a French comedy about a film director who sells his script to a movie studio only to find out that he is expected to make a porn flick instead of a dramatic masterpiece. We don't know if this was a nod to Walerian Borowczyk whose filmography evolved from avant-garde to European soft-core, including the almost parodical Emmanuelle V in 1986.

Borowczyk started with ingenious stop motion and animations and shocked the public (and the censors) with the live action Immoral Tales (1974), A Story of Sin (1975) and The Beast (1975), movies that acquired a cult status and that placed him next to contemporary directors as Stanley Kubrick or Roman Polanski. They didn't avoid experiment either but were popular while Borowczyk's movies were only known to the small circle of critics and movie buffs. For his next production he wanted to go for something less shocking and more accessible...

All the necessary ingredients for a successful product were there: 'Andy Warhol' star and beautiful boy Joe Dallesandro, hot in France after appearing in Serge Gainsbourg's movie Je t'aime moi non plus, was hired for the male lead role. Sylvia Kristel was the female lead. Although type-casted as a sex-goddess, she was actually an excellent much-wanted actress and Europe's box-office queen (thanks to the Emmanuelle franchise). A top-score soundtrack was assembled with French songs, old and new, and international hits by 10CC (I'm Not In Love), Elton John (Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)), Sailor (Glass of Champagne) and Pink Floyd (Shine On You Crazy Diamond). Bernard Daillencourt was the cinematographer and his work for Borowczyk was so appreciated that David Hamilton hired him in to work on his flimsy but utterly lucrative erotic trilogy: Bilitis, Laura and Tendres Cousines. Actress Camille Lariviere would also figure in Bilitis. The original novel, from writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues, had won the Prix Goncourt for the best novel of 1967. He had also written The Girl on a Motorcycle, put to film with Alain Delon and a young Marianne Faithful.

La Marge is a dramatic mixture of love, death, adultery, suicide and full frontal Euro-chic. A rich and handsome vine-grower, madly in love with his wife and their son, visits a brothel on a business trip to Paris. The previous sentence would be contradictory in about every country, except in France where having an extra-marital fling is something of a national sport. After the obligatory nookie with a disinterested Diana, who literally clinches to her money, the man receives a letter that his son has drowned in the swimming pool and that his wife has committed suicide. Instead of going home for the funeral the widower tries to cope with the tragedy by visiting the prostitute again who feels that something basically has changed in his, and her, attitude. There is no happy end, but – like David Lynch in Twin Peaks – it has lots of weird symbolism like a dwarf watching TV or a voyeuristic cleaning lady looking through the keyholes. Don't be puzzled by this ironic review, the movie is a masterpiece in its genre and one of Borowczyk's best and it seriously mystifies us why this hasn't got the same notoriety like Emmanuelle or Bilitis.

About everything was present to make this the autumn box-office hit of 1976 but La Marge sank without a trace... Sylvia Kristel's blow-job scene, with Shine On You Crazy Diamond on the background, should have been a scene tattooed in every film-fan's brain, like Marlon Brando's butter extravaganza in Last Tango In Paris. To cash in on Sylvia Kristel's fame the movie was even renamed (and re-dubbed) as Emmanuelle '77 (or Emanuela 77) for foreign markets but that only added to the confusion.

It has been rumoured that new (nude or even pornographic) scenes, filmed by another director without the knowledge of Borowczyk, were added for an American cut, known as The Streetwalker, but nobody has ever managed to compare both versions.

The soundtrack, with 10CC, Elton John and Pink Floyd, may also have been the reason why the movie has never became a cult classic as a Gordian copyright knot (aka Pink Floyd's legal stubbornness) prevented a general release on DVD. A Japanese home release, however, does exist, although it has several blurs at strategic places, there also floats a French Canal+ copy around but that omits some of the voyeuristic 'Lynchian' scenes.

Sigh... forget the other reviews and let me explain the movie.

[tensaip · 9/10 · 4 June 2009]

In the prologue highlighting Sigimond's idyllic family life, he mentions a trip he is going to make to Paris. The narrative then skips ahead to show Sigimond in Paris. There is directorial intent to confuse the audience into believing that this trip is the same one Sigimond had mentioned, but that is later revealed indirectly not to be the case. This trip happens at a later date. The other reviewers missed that vital detail. While on that earlier trip to Paris he had mentioned to his wife, his son drowned and the wife committed suicide. The letter Sigimond retrieved from the post office (the one that had been sent to him by his maid concerning the death of his family) was NOT the first time he learned about it. It was her resignation letter, since she cannot herself deal with the tragedy.

The key thing to remember is that LA MARGE is a love story. However, it is very abstract in how it seeks to unravel their courtship ritual. There is a misconception shared by the other reviewers that Sigimond is cheating on his wife or had been cheating on his wife. That view is entirely the opposite of the filmmaker's intention. Sigimond is still entirely devoted to his wife, but as seen in the prologue, he has a mighty libido. He can't bring himself to LOVE other women, but he still has the desire for sex -- therefore, he travels to Paris to binge on prostitutes. Note that the super-hot hotel maid tries to tempt him into putting a move on her without success at least three times. Diana, on the other hand, won't fall in love either for the usual professional reasons -- her jaded mercenary demeanor is what convinces Sigimond to keep going back to her as she seems to be the character opposite of his late wife, Sergine.

There has also been complete and total misunderstanding of the ending by the other reviewers. The magic of this movie is in the PROCESS not the outcome. I'll tell you right now that as in most Euro-Romance novels, there is no happy ending -- and that's a double entendre. Diana flees from her last session with Sigimond in mid-fellatio because she's realized that she's fallen in love with him and is frightened he'll notice by the change in her sex-making. Later Sigimond shoots himself because the feelings he's developed for Diana made him feel unfaithful to Sergine's memory.

LA MARGE is by far the best work I've seen by either Dallesandro, Kristel, or director Walarien Borowczyk. This is a movie about body movement and the subtle ways in which emotions can be communicated through such movement. Apparently, one can tell whether or not one is in love with someone by the kind of orgasm one receives from him/her.

Art House Erotica

[SMK-4 · 10/10 · 23 September 1998]

La Marge is the kind of film conventional film critics hate to review, because it does not quite fit into these little genre boxes they have in their heads.

In its cinematography and story-telling La Marge is very much like an Art House picture: we have emotions, tragedy, laughter, silence, pictures telling a story, plot twists, slow pace, all the ingredients you might expect in the most toffee-nosed productions only people with a university degree are supposed to enjoy. And yet, it is also a piece of erotica, shamelessly exploitative and very effective in its abundant use of (mostly) female nudity and its sex scenes.

Erotic cinema does not get any classier than this.

Walerian Borowczyk's Most Underrated Film

[carnivalofsouls · 10/10 · 13 February 2008]

Borowczyk remains one of the least appreciated filmmakers of his era, inarguably an auteur, but one so erratic and unusual that he remains cherished only by a handful of critics for his early surrealist work and by cult movie devotees for his later, sexually-explicit films. While from the mid-seventies onward his films would range from the good (Behind Convent Walls, The Story of Sin) to the not-so-good (The Art of Love, Immoral Tales, etc), his film-making legacy rests with the bizarre La Bete, which unfortunately belongs to the latter category. However it is his early films (both animated and live action) that are undoubtedly Borowczyk's key works – Blanche, for instance, is one of the finest films ever made, while Goto the Island of Love is almost as good – and in many ways these films set up the themes that would be prevalent throughout much of his subsequent work, most importantly that sex is constantly linked with guilt, persecution and death.

This is perhaps why La Marge is so unjustly obscure. The casting of Kristel (not to mention the film's alternate title Emmanuelle '77) suggests the film was tailored to appeal to the softcore market, yet the emphatically gloomy atmosphere and subject matter, which includes death, adultery and suicide, is significantly at odds with this. Compared to the other Borowczyk films of this period, with perhaps the exception of The Story of Sin, La Marge is surprisingly restrained. The film works because of its minimalism and ambiguity – the dialogue is sparse, presumably because of the actors' inability to speak French, and their character motivation is vague to say the least. It is never made clear why Sigimond is driven to cheat on his seemingly perfect wife, though it is perhaps no coincidence that Diana more than slightly resembles her. Borowczyk as usual fills the movie with visual motifs, using reflective surfaces to signify the duality of Sigimond's life, and lingering, unerotic shots of female genitalia to convey what is at the core of his actions and desires, and what is, in essence, being a Borowczyk film, Sigimond's prison.

The film is beautifully photographed, full of the director's obtuse trademark framing, and, something rather unusual for Borowczyk, features a remarkable period soundtrack, from the first Kristel/Dallesandro sex scene played out to 10CC's I'm Not in Love to the stunning blowjob sequence set to Pink Floyd, and an incredible climax that employs Elton John's Funeral For a Friend. While La Marge is distinctively a Borowczyk film in many respects, it also possesses a sombreness and maturity that was rare for the director, for despite the occasional surreal moment (a dwarf watching television, a hotel maid examining her breasts in the mirror, a deranged old woman watching sex through a keyhole), it is primarily a straightforward examination of two doomed characters unable to escape the prisons of their existence. Fans of the director's early work may find the film overly conventional, while devotees of his later period may be disappointed by how restrained it is, yet La Marge is an unfairly neglected film, one of the director's most enduring and haunting works.

Voyage to the end of the night

[andrabem-1 · 9/10 · 10 July 2012]

LA MARGE by Borowski is a dreamy and trippy film – it is anchored in the reality, but it shows a hidden, subconscious reality. Poetic, dramatic and cool, it features also a good, evocative soundtrack of the 70s.

Sigimond (Joe Dallesandro) is married to Sergine. Sergine is pretty and she lives with Sigimond a fulfilled life, sexually and otherwise. One day Sigimond (Joe Dallesandro) goes to Paris, and by night, in a brothel, he knows a prostitute, Diana (Sylvia Kristel). She will personify the mystery of pleasure – beautiful, delicate and elusive. Diana (Sylvia Krystel) will be his obsession.

LA MARGE has mobile and sensitive cameras, a good portrayal of the milieu (environment and characters) and a wonderful soundtrack (for example, the almost forgotten 10cc among others)

LA MARGE is a very personal film – if you like cinema as an audiovisual art, you should try this film, but those that want a film with a very straightforward story should look elsewhere.

Beautiful & surreal art-house kult classic

[Falconeer · 9/10 · 4 November 2007]

Joe Dallesandro & Sylvia Kristel burn up the silver screen in this outrageously erotic, and shamelessly exploitative epic from kult director Walarien Borowczyk (The Beast, Behind Convent Walls). Dallesandro is Sigimond, husband to a beautiful woman, and father to a little boy. His marriage is idyllic, his life complete. However when he is called to Paris on business he cannot help but notice the mysterious and beautiful prostitute, Diana. Sylvia Kristel is astoundingly sexy as the jaded Diana, who struts around in her black feather coat, always careful to not mess up her expensive coif. Kristel towers above the other prostitutes, and appears simultaneously elegant and trashy. The two share a sexually charged evening together, and the nude forms of these two sex symbol icons of the 70's helps to make "La Marge" an absolute classic of the genre. After the encounter, Sigimond receives some tragic news from home; His little boy has drowned in their swimming pool, and his wife has taken her own life out of despair. Finding the news too hard to deal with, Sigi throws himself into a decadent, sexual affair with Diana. The prostitute has no idea of the family tragedy, and begins to believe that perhaps this man is falling in love with her, and she begins to develop feelings for him as well. After a well-documented series of sexual encounters between the two, Siggi begins to feel that his infidelity might have somehow caused the death of his wife and son. And of course there is no happy ending here, for Sigimond, or Diana.

The look of the production is rich, filmed in primarily garish colours. The costumes, especially Kristel's wardrobe, which is entirely black, are elegant. The nudity is often blunt, with many shots of naked bodies filmed from the neck down, lending a voyeuristic feel to some scenes. Director Borowczyk lets the camera pan slowly down the bodies of his actors, leering at their nudity. This style occasionally lends the film a slightly pornographic feel. But this is in no way pornographic, as from start to finish, every scene is artfully filmed, paying great attention to little details. The use of pop music of the day, as well as some dreamy Pink Floyd music adds to the surreal goings on. "La Marge" possesses a definite haunting quality, that is hard to describe. The old woman who cleans the rooms of the prostitutes is forever cruising the halls and peeking into the keyholes, and there is a vicious pimp, who becomes quite jealous and violent when he realizes that his girl Diana might be falling for a client. "La Marge" is also a 'must see' for fans of Sylvia Kristel, as her portrayal of the jaded and proud hooker Diana is her best, most provocative role to date. She is permitted to show a bit more depth and personality here than when she had her turn as 'Emmanuelle.' And she has never looked more beautiful. Not surprisingly there is no English subtitled DVD available, which is a tragedy indeed. But there are bootlegs that pop up on the internet occasionally. "La Marge" is probably Borowczyk's finest and most accessible film, next to his gorgeous "Behind Convent Walls," and is well worth tracking down.