Ars Amandi

Offbeat erotica is all we can now expect from the once highly regarded Borowczyk. The setting is Rome, AD 8, where the heroine, her mother, neighbours and servant are all engaged on a brisk round of copulation, when they're not down at the amphitheatre listening to old Ovid dispense a mixture of common sense and bathos. Sets and props are minimal, the choppy editing is made choppier by the BBFC, characters hardly exist as individuals. And any sense of the past is overwhelmed by the dubbing and lines like 'Swear it on the privates of your favourite god!' Yet Borowczyk's remote, faintly amused view of sexual arrangements is distinctive. No one else would direct a scene the way he does, at least not deliberately.