Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/18/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, November 18, 2019

Belladonna of Sadness (Eiichi Yamamoto, 1973)

Belladonna of Sadness (Eiichi Yamamoto, 1973)

Cast: voices of Tatsuya Nakadai, Aiko Nagayama, Katsuyuki Ito, Shigako Shimegi, Masaya Takahashi, Natsuka Yashiro, Masakane Yonekura. Screenplay: Yoshiyuki Fukuda, Eiichi Yamamoto. Cinematography: Shigeru Yamazaki. Production design: Kuni Fukai. Animation: Gisburo Sugii. Music: Masahiko Sato.

There are images of extraordinary beauty and sinister power in Belladonna of Sadness, but they are also mixed with Pop Art clichés; psychedelia borrowed from Peter Max and his acolytes, album covers, and the Beatles' film Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968); and kitsch reminiscent of greeting cards and nudie illustrations from back issues of Playboy. That is to say, it's a mixed bag. There seems to have been at some point an attempt to turn the film's fable into a feminist statement, but the link of the story of a violated woman who turns into a witch with the role of women in the French Revolution is tacked on unconvincingly at the film's end. Nevertheless, it's like no other animated film I've seen, and not just because its images have a striking, violent erotic content. The story is about Jeanne, who on the night of her wedding to Jean is subjected to the ruler's droit de seigneur, but not just to him: She is raped by his courtiers as well. Trigger warnings are appropriate at this moment, because the rape is signified by images of Jeanne being torn apart with a torrent of blood that fills the screen. Eventually, Jeanne is tempted by the devil (a terrific voice performance by Tatsuya Nakadai), who appears to her in the form of a penis (no kidding). She allows him to possess her body but not her soul, and through various episodes, including a harrowing treatment of the Black Death, she prevails, striking out against nobility and the church. At one point she "liberates" the peasantry by means of an orgy, a sexual fantasy that is both astonishing and sometimes hilarious. Eventually, she is caught and burned at the stake, but the implication is that, like her namesake Jeanne D'Arc's, her cause will prevail. The film's vision is ultimately incoherent, but its audacity is worth experiencing.