As with many of Walerian Borowczyk’s films, The Story of Sin takes a woman as its main protagonist, following the transition of Eve (Grazyna Dlugolecka) from innocence to experience in turn-of-the-century Poland, primarily through her on-off relationship with one man, married anthropologist Lukasz (Jerzy Zelnick). Based on a novel by Stefan Zeromski, this journey expectedly takes in a number of events and often errs on the side of melodrama, featuring as it does poverty, prostitution and murder, an aspect which perhaps explains the film’s popularity. Yet despite being Borowczyk’s most densely plotted film, especially in comparison to its immediate follow-ups La Marge and Behind Convent Walls, the director’s response to the material is the same as always. He is not so much a storyteller as an illustrator.
