Goto, l'île d'amour

Walerian Borowczyk is rarely mentioned these days but back in the 1970s and 1980s he created quite a stir with arthouse/soft porn movies like 'Immoral Tales', 'Behind Convent Walls', 'Dr Jekyll and His Women', and especially his sensational 'The Beast', which is still quite unlike any movie you've ever seen, believe me! So I was very interested to be able to watch 'Goto', which I believe was his first full length feature. It doesn't have the sexual content you might expect (there is some very brief nudity, but that's it really), but it's still VERY odd, even for Borowczyk, and utterly fascinating. The story is set on the island of Goto, which after a natural disaster in the late 19th Century, has kept its society frozen in the past. Nothing much changes and everything is static and ritualized. This makes the plot reminiscent of Kafka and Mervyn Peake. Mentioning those two might give you SOME idea of what to expect, but it's a very difficult movie to categorize or describe. It's nowhere near as outrageous as some of Borowczyk's later and better known work, but if you treasure strange and unusual movies I highly recommend you track it down.

An interesting work that seems to present an allegory about power and the human condition.

In an absolute, immobilist monarchy, installed on an isolated and sparsely inhabited island, we witness the meteoric social rise of an unscrupulous thief.

Everything served in a decadent, minimal, grotesque environment, but well framed, with a good taste in black and white cinematography (with rare and brief incursions of color), which does not go unnoticed.

The film is certainly pretentious and at times even hermetic, but the end result is still a very interesting challenge for the viewer.

More than a critique of regimes, social inequalities, customs, the work seems to provoke a deeper and more philosophical reflection on the very essence of humanity.

This second feature (in '67 he directed the animated film Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal which followed short films, again with animation awarded throughout Europe), the first with actors, reveals his remarkable aesthetic skills (before his film career he had dedicated himself to the figurative arts). The use of degraded scenography enhanced by black and white photography, represent the right background for a stylized history of oppression (he will go into voluntary exile in France in strong controversy with the communist regime of his country) and desire that will lay the foundations for the stylistic elements of his future films. The director, best known for his erotic works, should be rediscovered for these early works, useful for an all-round view of his cinema.

Polish-born, French-based filmmaker, animator and artist Walerian Borowczyk is mainly remembered for his erotic works such as The Beast and The Margin, and has been described as "a genius who also happened to be a pornographer." Before he dabbled in eroticism, he produced many animated shorts before his first feature-length piece, the wonderfully weird Mr. and Mrs. Kabal's Theatre. His first live-action film, Goto, Isle of Love, employed similar tactics to his hand-drawn experiments: a desolate island setting, limited camera movements, and frustratingly (yet fascinatingly) odd and unrelatable characters. The result is somewhat isolating, but often reminiscent of the surreal genius of Georges Franju, Luis Bunuel and Borowczyk's friend and sometime collaborator Chris Marker.

Tidal inundation has seen the island of Goto cut off from the rest of Europe for three generations. It has seen three leaders since - Goto I, Goto II, and the current ruler Goto III (Pierre Brasseur) - and the monarchy rules as a dictatorship, 'protecting' the island from outside dangers and influences. There seems to be little to do on the island, so Goto keeps himself and his wife Glossia (Ligia Branice) entertained by staging fights between prisoners. Petty thief Grozo (Guy Saint-Jean) manages to survive his battle with a towering lug-head and wins the sympathy of Goto. Grozo's reward is a job building fly-catchers and showing off his work to a classroom of under-educated children. He also uncovers an affair between Glossia and handsome captain-of-the-guard Gono (Jean-Pierre Andreani), and grows bolder and more ambitious in his scheming as he seeks to claw himself up the social ladder.

On an island populated by criminals, no-hopers and aristocrats, Glossia emerges as the only sympathetic character. Played by La Jetee's Ligia Branice, she longs to escape this grey, mundane world, her eyes shining with tears as she watches the boat she hoped to sail away on sank before her. With little to hold on to on an emotional level, Goto becomes an observational piece, a commentary on an isolated society with an obvious anti-dictatorship stance. This is a world so lacking in stimulation that the object which draws the most fascination is a cutting-edge fly-catcher stolen by Gozo and flogged as his own design. It's deliberately farcical but lacking in humour, with the world made even more soul-crushing by the stark black-and-white photography and Borowczyk's preference for limited camera movements. It's an interesting piece but one that will likely leave you feeling cold, but certainly a work of art deserving of rigorous study.

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The madness of Goto, l'île d'amour is not for everyone. Borowczyk's film is an insane dream-like look into a shattered and dysfunctional world, which if I was to guess, is probably how he sees our own one. So in that sense I suspect that the film is thematically, at least, allegorical.

The Kingdom of Goto we might suspect, given that all the characters use only one letter of the alphabet to start their name, is 1/26th of what it was in its former glory and totally cut off from the outside world. What cataclysm was involved in the sinking of the rest of the archipelago (the original trailer to the movie informs us that it was such) is left untouched upon. What remains is a world where the people have existed for a century for the King's good pleasure (although Goto's educationalist is at pains to give us his correct constitutional position, which is that he has become King by informal acclamation). It is clear that Goto III views all his subjects as dogs, especially in the way that he strokes the back of Grozo's head when he pleads for clemency. Furthermore the only form of entertainment appears to be forcing convicts to fight and executions.

A good way to look at the movie, as another reviewer has suggested is through the lens of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy. Grozo is a Steerpike-like social climber intent on being with the king's wife Glyssia (played by Ligia Branice who plays Blanche in the Borowcyzk's movie of the same name, and who was also Borowcyzk's wife). His rise is the narrative backbone of the film.

The flavour of this movie is not love but lust. Grozo becomes the official boot-polisher and keeper of the queen's clothes, and it is clear that he derives much sexual satisfaction from this position. One clear example of the film's preoccupation with this is a split-second shot of Glyssia's wonderful feet in sensual red boots. There is also a sense that Grozo is an Oedipus (as another commenter has alluded to) in the way in which he buries his head in the lap of Glyssia awaiting clemency, a shot of which recurs throughout the film in flashback.

The surreal sex and death theme is kept up with a wondrously gaudy colour close-up shot of a bucket filled with bloodied water, just used to clean up after an execution. There is also the symbology of flies, which was very important to Bataille and other Surrealists.

There are two versions of this movie, one without any colour scenes, which I saw several years ago. And one with several very short bursts of colour of lunatic clarity on the Cult Epics DVD that I watched more recently. It is essential to watch the latter.

I love Borowczyk's shooting style, the screen is always parallel to the background wall, and the shots if not static pan very little. A fellow enthusiast has suggested that this makes the viewer feel like a voyeuristic interloper. For myself I am a fan of such formalism. There is a magnificent colour sequence at the end, of Glossia's bedroom, where, in a coup de maǐtre, the director totally abandons his shooting rubric and the camera rolls around Glossia's bedroom like the eye of a madman. It's an exquisite and jarring change. We are made to feel the glee of the fetishist who's eye caresses a room which is strewn with pastel-coloured silks and other feminine apparel.

The use of music in Borowczyk's films must be noted, the soundtrack to Blanche is one of the great soundtracks and Goto is accompanied by an impeccable Handel organ score which blasts out (as organ music should) during silences.

It would be interesting to know what a feminist film historian might think of this movie. The only women we ever see are whores, or with Glyssia an ineffectual sex object.

So if absurdity, fetish, surrealism, and organ music are right up your street, look no further. The only slight problem I had with the movie is the editing, I felt that at times the movie did not flow smoothly enough, but perhaps the effect was intentional.