A naughty movie, nicely filmed and curiously intense. Two plots go along together, overlapping tenuously from time to time. The framing story tells of a family of decayed aristocrats in a large, handsome house, which they are in danger of losing to massive debt and bad luck. Their hopes lie in getting a young heiress to marry Mathurin (Pierre Benedetti) of the suave count Pierre de l'Esperance, which needs to be done within a certain time period to fit the conditions of a will, and the brother of the plaintive duc de Balo (Marcel Dalio), a cardinal, is supposed to officiate at the wedding. His secretary keeps hanging up the phone on de Balo, who's in trouble. Mathurin has never been baptized, so his father does it. The heiress Lucy Broadhurst (Lisbeth Hummel) arrives with her chaperone just in time to see a stallion mounting a mare, and she smilingly takes pictures, focusing on the prodigious equine member. In the house, everyone must wait for the cardinal. Lucy goes to bed for a nap and looks at her polaroids and begins to touch herselfand this is where the second plot begins, with her heated imagination. She combines in her mind a family story of an 18th-century ancestor, a beautiful woman, who encountered a beast in the forest, and he had his way with her, with her recent memory of the horse's enormous penis. She imagines what happened nearly 200 years earlier, and her bedroom gives way to a vision of Romilda d'Esperance (Sirpa Lane) playing Scarlatti on a harpsichord and watching a lamb stray from the meadow. She follows it into the woods, where the beast takes interest in her. He's never seen clearly; instead, he is rendered by shots of dark fur, black eyes, pointy nose, sharp teeth, clawed hands, and a prodigious member very much like the stallion's. Romilda is first frightened and then happily compliant, and the beast is strikingly hydraulic. In the second masturbation scene the Romilda-Beast liaison is even more mutual and graphic, with fountains of whitish fluid jetting from his dark body. Romilda evidently uses him up and she buries him in leaves and walks back to the château naked and satisfied. Meanwhile, things are very strange in the modern château: Pierre d'Esperance kills his uncle the duc, and Mathurin dies mysteriously, either by a fall from his bed or because he couldn't live long after being baptized. When his corpse is exposed, he has a darkly hirsute back and a tail, and one of his hands, bandaged throughout the film, is clawed like the Beast's. Lucy screams and runs away; the cardinal arrives at last, pockets the polaroids (for future reference), and says some things about the sin of bestiality. Unlike most aesthetically-inclined erotic movies, the fantasy sex is more coherent and accessible than the framing plot. It crosses boundaries, to be sure, but the action really takes place in the mind of the sexually hungry Lucy, who plays with the idea of transgressive sex in the safety of her bedroom, her eyes closed and her hands busy. The so-called "real" world is less safe, and more confusing.
