Immoral Tales...old and nice

The film is separated into four stories. The first story involves André (Fabrice Luchini) who takes his 16-year old cousin (played by Lise Danvers) to the beach to perform fellatio on him in tune to the waves of the incoming tide. The second story is titled Thérése Philosophe and involves a teenage country girl (Charlotte Alexandra) who intermingles sexual desires in her imagination with her dedication to Christ after being locked in her room. The third story features Elizabeth Báthory (Paloma Picasso) as a Countess who murders young girls in order to gain eternal youth by bathing in their blood. The final story involves the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, Lucrezia Borgia (Florence Bellamy), having sex with her male relatives.Immoral Tales (French: Contes immoraux) is a 1974 French anthology film directed by Walerian Borowczyk. The film was Borowczyk's most sexually explicit at the time. The film is split into four erotic themed stories that involve the loss of virginity, masturbation, bloodlust and incest.After the release of Immoral Tales, Borowczyk began to fall out of favor from film critics. Modern critical reception to the film is that it is not one of Borowczyk's strongest works.

After the release of Immoral Tales, Borowczyk began to fall out of favor from film critics. New York Magazine wrote a negative review referring to the film as "episodic and disjointed, but also written with a great deal of stupidity" and describing the story-telling, directing, acting and photography in the film as "wretched".Among modern reviews, Allrovi gave the film three stars out of five, feeling that first two stories did not work as well as the second two as well as stating that it was Borowczyk's move from "arthouse material and toward softcore; as such, the material displays its director's characteristic intelligence but lapses into exploitation a little too often". In an overview of Borowczyk's work in the film magazine Senses of Cinema, Immoral Tales is referred to as his weakest amongst his first five feature films and that "an unsensational approach to the material and detached gaze of the camera make it closer to a surrealist text than a pornographic movie." David Kehr wrote a review for the Chicago Reader praising that the film "contains some very elegant images" but compared it negatively to Borowczyk's followup Story of a Sin which Kehr proclaimed "avoided the trap of superficiality by adopting an ironic mode. Here, he seems entirely too sincere—and more than a little dull."