🧠 Estreno:
The Margin is an erotic drama released in 1976. It was directed by the French Walerian Borowczyk, who is recognized for blending surrealism, decay, and eroticism. The film features softcore star Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle) with Joe Dallesandro, the Warhol veteran and underground sex symbol, playing the lead roles. La Marge was based on a novel written by André Pieyre de Mandiargues.
The plot centers around a married Paris businessman, Sigismond (Dallesandro). His life spirals into a metaphysical abyss of desire when he learns of his wife’s death. He resorts to a high-class call girl, Diana (Kristel), with whom he has an affair, but the outcomes are dampened by loss. Rather than liberation, there is detachment and an empty theater of eroticism.
La Marge does not care for narrative propulsion; like the protagonist, it drifts between reality and dreams. The film feels less like a motion picture and more like a fusion of elegy and erotic fever dream.
🎭 Performances and Character Arcs
A striking example of presence over performance is Joe Dallesandro. He isn’t given conventional emotional arcs; his task is to perform alienation, to glide like a specter through ghosted rooms filled with light and yearning. He communicates character more with his body and silence than words, fitting the film’s tone. His Sigismond is a sex and memory man who is unsteadily tethered to reality.
Kristel captures not just Diana’s sensuality, but shattering sadness too. Unlike the liberated Emmanuelle, to the camera she is shown slowly fracturing under the pressure of being wanted but never actually looked at. Her beauty is a mask; her eyes are dramatic enough to hide all the tragedy that remains unsaid. Even as the film undresses her, she, more than anyone else, gives the film its heart.
🎞️ Concept and Design
A hypnotic Paris drenched in shadow, mirrors, velvet, and ash looks visually mesmerizing La Marge. Surrealist and animator Borowczyk, known for his work in animation and surrealism, fills each frame with painstaking, almost gluttonous detail. Blurring the edge of reality and memory, the film soft focus, ambient, and prolonged close up techniques create a sense of being trapped inside someone’s feverish dreams or memories.
La marge depicts sex bereft of intimacy, serving instead as a diversion from grief. The depiction of eroticism is devoid of romance, but effortlessly alluring. Instead, it emerges like a ritual draped in desolation, where each orgasm reverberates through a hollow echo chamber, amplifying the grief trapped within.
Grief lingers like a scar, and in La Marge, the most harrowing manifestation of that pain is the void left by the loss of desire. When Grief consumes one’s existence, it transforms the body into an empty vessel yearning for pleasure.
This is how La Marge portrays contemporary ache. Shockingly sad yet beautiful in a corroded way, paralysingly distant.
The vivid images capture nudity devoid of intimacy, transitioning into sex devoid of affection, a purely performative endeavor. Sigismond adores her from a distance, staring dreamily through the window of intimacy at the woman who exists as a mere illusion—not a being he can engage with.
The distance between their bodies becomes so vast it shatters. Dull disassociation defines the robotics of desire that enable the viewer to transform into a voyeur and perverse enact accomplice within this theatre of detachment.
Displacement of the Existence
The film “La Marge” also titled ‘The Margin’ in English encapsulates the characters’ lives as being emotionally adrift or detached. The film expresses trauma as a displacement that puts a person in limbo.
Reappraisal dubs “La Marge” as one of Borowczyk’s more emotionally compelling films
La Marge was met with mixed reviews and controversies upon release. Fans of Kristel’s more erotic and accessible works found the film too abstract, while art-house critics typically dismissed it as masked softcore as they often do with his works. Despite this, over time it has been reappraised as one of Borowczyk’s more visually ambitious and emotionally rousing films.
The film currently enjoys cult status within erotic art cinema due to being more fragmented than narrative and elegiac than sexually charged. It shares the same breath as Just Jaeckin’s The Story of O, yet boasts a deeper longing for transcendence. Final Verdict : Whether you will enjoy watching La Marge or not
Only if you are ready to feel instead of follow. The film lacks action or intricate resolution – guarded by the intoxicating scent of a cinematic perfume. It does not entice; it rather haunts. Its eroticism is laced with melancholy, the pacing contemplative, and the atmosphere enveloped in beautiful suffocation.
For those who appreciate filmmakers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nagisa Oshima, or even Antonioni, there is something to appreciate in La Marge. It is, however, too disembodied and ethereal for those who seek plot and pleasure.