LULU
France, 1980, 105 minutes, Colour.
Anne Bennent, Michele Placido.
Directed by Walerian Borowyczk.
Lulu was adapted for the screen and directed by Polish director, long resident in Paris, Walerian Borowczyk.
Borowczyk trained as a painter and lithographer and this is evident in the lavish attention to detail he gave to the sets and décor for his films. However, he was also interested in erotic themes – developing them in the 1960s with such films as Blanche but really making an impact internationally during the 1970s with a number of films, many of which were considered at the time as pornographic: Immoral Tales, The Story of a Sin, The Beast, Behind Convent Walls, Private Collections. Lulu, much more accessible than his other films, came at the end of the 1970s.
He continued his film-making for over twenty more years – but was not as well known universally as he was in the 1970s.
German actress Anne Bennent appears as Lulu. She is the daughter of German actor Heinz Bennent and the sister of David Bennent who starred in The Tin Drum. Popular Italian actor and, more latterly, director, Michele Placido appears as the male lead.
1. The work and interests of Walerian Borowyczk? His Polish background and films? Working in France? His interest in passion, the erotic? Enclosed society? Moral stances - especially as regards relationships, sexuality, innocence, power?
2. His way of delineating characters and situations: heightened, symbols, dramatising drives? The importance of background, colour, decor, atmosphere and attention to detail? The feel of the characters and their situations rather than intellectual analysis?
3. Interest in classic texts, adaptations, his subjective interpretation? The appeal to the contemporary audience?
4. The brief dramatisation of a famous story? The use of fluid cinematic devices, colour photography, editing, episodes, the cumulative effect of the experience?
5. The atmosphere: specially for where Lulu lived, worked? origins, the painter, the theatre. the garret? A world of which she was the centre? Information of the period, news from outside coming into Lulu’s world?
6. Lulu as a symbol and type: innocence. damaged, beauty, sensuality, sexuality. power. manipulation? Her destructive personality?
7. Origins: the father and the control. the importance of memories and their effect?
8. The relationship with the painter, infatuation. murder. boredom, the past? Violent passion?
9. The manager and his passion, the son as chauffeur, the demands in the theatre. the relationship with the son. excessive infatuation -a besotting infatuation, death?
10. The significance of the interlude with the lesbian? Her personality, style, seeming respectability, voyeurism, laughter?
11. The sketching of the son, the father, the lesbian - and Lulu confined to the garret? Squalor, the street, the customers? Robbery?
12. The Jack the Ripper type and audience understanding of him? The lesbian and her agony? Murder, Lulu'a death? The pessimistic ending?
13. How effective a brief 19th. century melodrama? As a fable of passion and death?
