The Silent Ache of Desire: How La Marge Reflected the Lives Behind Its Characters
La Marge (1976) was Walerian Borowczyk’s ‘daring’ film because of the ‘soft-core’ erotic imagery. La Marge also it was ‘deeply melancholic’ because it reflects the ‘almost unbearable’ loneliness, sorrow, and grief. Unlike Borowczyk’s other films, La Marge was more than ‘sensitive’. As much as the film was corporeal, it was also about the disintegration of the emotions and the collapse being played out by the two actors, whose lives off-screen, appeared to inhabit the same miserable space as the two characters. Joe Dallesandro, the American underground actor, and Sylvia Kristel, the European woman ‘symbolizing liberated sensuality’ were beyond performers because they became part of the nationality of the broken dreams of an era.
La Marge and Walerian Borowczyk’s ‘melodrama’ and epistemology of fracture’
La Marge opens with the life of Sigismond (Joe Dallesandro), a man from the countryside who arrives in Paris after receiving the shocking news that his wife and son died. Instead of comforting the grief, he avoids directly confronting it by drifting into the’ Bohemian’ Paris’s nocturnal world, he meets Diana (Sylvia Kristel) a call girl whose detached beauty hides her weariness. This is not a romance or a ‘love’ story, it intimacy without hope, ruin.Borowczyk’s lens captures Paris not as la Ville Lumiére, but as a place suffused with muted despair. He films Sylvia’s unreturned looks and Joe’s silent agony as confessions. He fixates on the gestures — the hair brushing, a quivering cigarette — and the erotic scenes seem sacred in their exposed vulnerability. To Indian audiences, and fans of 1970s emotive Indian cinema, La Marge offered something similar — love, as a destructive yet redemptive force.
Joe Dallesandro: From Warhol’s Streets to Borowczyk’s Paris
Casting Joe Dallesandro was not a random choice. Dallesandro had already become a cult figure in Warhol’s Factory films and was, pioneer as the bare-chested symbol of New York’s underground rebellion. He was born as a working class Italian American in 1948, with a troubled youth, in juvenile detention, petty theft, and homelessness, before fame found him. His five rough years, were just enough to add the rugged vulnerability, a certain quality, for the roles Dallesandro was to play.
When Joe was approached by Borowczyk for La Marge, he was at a turning point in his career. His aspirations in Hollywood were unfulfilled, and he was mostly known in art-house cinemas. Joe found a kindred spirit in Sigismond, a man lost in the world, and dealing with the struggles of grief and the fragmentation of one’s self. Joe’s silences were not a product of training, but rather a result of, and the product of, personal experience. His silences were not even close to empty, but rather full of recollections of New York’s dark and desperate alleys, and of the people and criminals that passed through those alleys.
When he was interviewed in later years, Joe stated that La Marge was a memory that he carried and acted. His eyes were filled with the memory of the restless and chaotic confusion that he had lived with in New York. For him, this Paris wasn’t romantic; it was another version of the chaos he thought he had left behind.
Sylvia Kristel: The Goddess Who Longed for Peace
Sylvia Kristel was an international symbol of erotic freedom after the success of 1974 film Emmanuelle. The novel La Marge was published afterwards. However, the fame that followed the success of Kristel’s Emmanuelle was accompanied by a high price. Under the surface of the self-assured Kristel, a woman with a difficult childhood, troubled relations, and the burden of fame, was a man fighting inner demons.
Krisel’s role as “Diana” was steeped in irony. “Diana” played the fantasy image that society had, and imposed, that image on Kristel. Yet she was able to captured the weariness and tiredness of the role, as if rebelling against that facination. In one scene, after simulating intercourse, “Diana” was so tired that she simply sat and stared, and it was Kristel, and not the character, who was so exhausted as to simply stare.
Krisel’s off camera, private life, mirrored “Diana’s” emotional detachment. Like Kristel, most people “perform normal life” while privately feeling intensely hollow. The fragile woman, who during the filming of La Marge, performed normal life, said so little to the people she was working with. Instead she turned to her art to restore her troubled spirit, and kept to the company of her poetry and sketches.
A Director in a Balance Between Sensuality and Soul
Walerian Borowczyk was often thought to be misunderstood due to his visual style and fascination with the erotic. While some critics thought he was a provocateur, one can see the sensitivity to human suffering in La Marge. He approached the film with the patience of a painter and employed techniques such as long takes, minimal dialogue, and the use of diffused natural light to create a scene that resembled a faded, distant memory.
People often do not realize that La Marge’s sad tone was, in a significant part, a product of Borowczyk’s own experiences. Having left Poland and escaping the censors, he carried the nostalgia and pain of exile. La Marge, based on Mandiargues’ novel, was his examination of alienation, both physical and emotional. He found Joe and Sylvia to be kindred spirits. He, too, was displaced, disillusioned, and achingly human.
Behind the Scenes: Silent Connections, Isolated Spaces
Filming La Marge required less glamor than what the European cinema of the time portrayed from the bigger European cities. Much of the film was shot in a real Parisian apartment, which lent the film a sort of authenticity that matched the emotional rawness of the film. Borowczyk’s sets were notably silent. There were no grand rehearsals, no dramatic scenes, or outbursts from angry frustrated crew members. Borowczyk required little direction and asked actors to, and I quote, “just feel.”
The contrasting personalities of Joe and Sylvia did not prevent the forming of a bond of sorts. They shared cigarettes between takes and, in what many would call the best kind, silence. It was a connection not built on chemistry, which many would think, but on mutual understanding, and a kind of bond that two people could share with no one lost and navigating the isolating fog of fame.
Borowczyk’s desire to film love scenes with minimal crew remaining was, in the memory of one crew member, to preserve the intimacy of the scene. It was most important to the crew. The end result was not just sensual, but tender, and in our time, almost sacred. It was the sacredness of fragility.
The Echo After the Applause
Polarized comments were made on the premiere of La Marge. While some viewers considered the film to be “hauntingly poetic,” others considered it “artful pornography.” Over the years, it became acknowledged as one of Borowczyk’s most emotionally mature works. In France, it attracted the viewers who “got” the strange intimacy of the mourning. In India, where eroticism was overtly concealed, La Marge gained circulation within film societies alongside taboo private screenings, celebrated for depicting, “the sorrow of the body,” with boldness.
For Joe Dallesandro, it was the beginning of the European phase of his career for which he felt a degree of artistic redemption. For Sylvia Kristel, it contributed to the myth that surrounded her as a screen actress of tragic, sensual, and untouchable. But, mythic as it was, it concealed a woman, in missing pieces like Diana, striving for something concrete and real in a world that was illusions.
The Margin Between Life and Art
La Marge, “The Margin” in English, serves as an appropriate title for the story and for the life circumstances of its characters. Dallesandro, Kristel, and Borowczyk all occupied that space which was an intersection of passion and despair, fame and deep solitude. Watching the film now is like reading a confession from the 1970s, an era charged with intoxicating liberation and its burdens.
Ultimately, La Marge is not only about love or loss. It depicts the subtle pain that connects people who don’t quite fit – onscreen or in life. Maybe that’s the reason it continues to resonate: because somewhere in the soft focus, the muted tones, and the silences, we see ourselves.
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