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A filmmaker who was often accused of soft-pornography, Walerian Borowczyk was more of a cinematic fetishist. His eye was as attracted to the little details and artefacts of his period settings as to the naked bodies of his protagonists. In Story of Sin, the only film he made in his native Poland, the attention he pays to the Victorian ephemera of the time is exquisite. He’s also uncharacteristically restrained regarding the amount of flesh on show in this opulent melodrama.
Grażyna Długołęcka is Ewa, a pious young bourgeois girl in Warsaw, first seen being warned about temptation by a priest. The church is the first of three constricting factors she faces. The others being the dominance of Poland by Tzarist Russia at the time, and the brutish masculinity she finds herself surrounded by. Despite all ecumenical warnings she, of course, falls swooningly in love with a brooding lodger (Jerzy Zelnik). When he departs suddenly to Rome to plead a divorce case against his wife, Ewa attempts to track him down in a breathless picaresque across Europe.
Story of Sin bears certain similarities to de Sade’s Justine in that a hapless young woman is treated to all manner of indignities by the numerous men she encounters. Ewa is unfairly punished for having fallen in love, and is used as an erotic tool for various nefarious ends. Even her lodger lover appears to be inconstant. Unlike de Sade’s writing, which delights in his heroine’s degradation, Borowczyk undoubtedly has sympathy for Ewa’s plight. It’s not a morality tale so much as a cautionary one; its satirical edge firmly directed at the social constructs that Ewa struggles against.
Długołęcka plays Ewa with the right curve from wide-eyed ingenue to battle-weary woman, even if the character is more an archetype than a fully-fleshed character. Stefan Zeromski, the novelist from whom Borowczyk adapted this tale was described as a Polish cross between Dickens and Zola, and this is perceivable in the examination of Polish society. It doesn’t however contain those writers’ eye for memorable protagonists. This is the film’s greatest flaw, particularly as the tale evolves into even greater melodrama towards the end.
Handsome, opulent and watchable from beginning to end; this relatively uncelebrated Borowczyk deserves reevaluation, even if the characters are sacrificed to the demands of the directors eye for period detail.