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.

Raging Sun, Raging Sky (Julián Hernández, 2009)

Raging Sun, Raging Sky (Julián Hernández, 2009)

Cast: Jorge Becerra, Javier Oliván, Guillermo Villegas, Giovanna Zacharías, Joaquin Rodríguez, Juan Carlos Torres, Fabian Storniolo, Harold Torres, Clarissa Rendón, Baltimore Beltran, Rubén Santiago, Rubén Ángel. Screenplay: Julián Hernández. Cinematography: Alejandro Cantú. Production design: Carolina Jiménez, Jesús Torres Torres. Film editing: Emiliano Arenales Osorio. Music: Arturo Villela.

Desire is not enough. That seems to be the motivating force behind Julián Hernández's extraordinary, sometimes exhilarating, often exasperating Raging Sun, Raging Sky. In the world of the film, gay men have achieved liberation of desire, but its currents flow through the old channels: cruising, hustling, casual pickups, phone sex, and encounters in porno theaters and public restrooms. It's a world that lacks a central love myth, a story of commitment, sacrifice, and redemption analogous to the legends of Héloïse and Abelard, Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde. And so Hernández sets out to provide one in the story of Ryo, Kieri, and Tari -- a triad rather than a duo, reflective perhaps of the more open relationships common in the gay world. But he chooses to tell their story in a tantalizing fashion, beginning his film with a woman who wanders through Mexico City, seemingly in search of something and distressed when she fails to find it. She seems to have, like the angels of Wim Wenders's great Wings of Desire (1987), the ability to overhear the thoughts of people she passes on the street and in a streetcar. Once she senses something from a young man on a motorbike, but he speeds away before she can talk to him. Finally, as it grows dark, she stops and leans on the parapet of a bridge, and a young man approaches her. It begins to rain, and he lends her his coat as they run back to his apartment where they make love. While he sleeps, she whispers to him, calling him Ryo, telling him that he will find someone to love, then dresses and goes to the window where she fades from sight. We will learn that she is Tatei, perhaps el corazón del cielo, the Mayan Heart of the Sky. But we won't learn that for two hours more, until after we meet the present-day protagonists, not only Ryo but also Kieri and Tari, the former a worker in a call center, the latter a boxer, both of whom lust after Ryo. When Ryo chooses to sleep with Kieri, Tari is enraged. And then the film begins to shift into fantasy, as the sleeping men begin to be covered with dust and a menacing Tari appears, his face painted. And finally the title credits appear, two hours into the film, as the story shifts into a mythic past in which Kieri, guided by Tatei, must conquer Tari and rescue Ryo. The section opens with a striking image of a dry riverbed from which Kieri literally rises, caked in dry mud, to begin his quest. Yes, it's more than three hours long, and probably shouldn't be. And yes, Hernández's vision is often derivative -- his work has been likened to that of any number of filmmakers, from Cocteau to Antonioni to Tarkovsky. But it's a film of powerful imagination and striking beauty, with a story told mostly through images -- there is scarcely any dialogue -- and the commitment of its young actors.  Is it the love myth that gay men need? That's not for me to say. But it's an honorable attempt at one.

In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993)

In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993)

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Pete Postlethwaite, Emma Thompson, John Lynch, Mark Sheppard, Don Baker, Corin Redgrave, Beatie Edney, Marie Jones, Daniel Massey, Paterson Joseph, Gerard McSorley. Screenplay: Terry George, Jim Sheridan, based on a book by Gerry Conlon. Cinematography: Peter Biziou. Production design: Caroline Amies. Film editing: Gerry Hambling. Music: Trevor Jones.

Reality doesn't come neatly packaged, so films based on "true stories" always have to lie to us. The trick is not letting the lies get in the way of what truth remains in the story. Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father was attacked for too much fictionalizing, too many departures from the facts, and the best that Sheridan could do was to claim that the film was not so much a story about Gerry Conlon and the Guildford Four -- falsely arrested for terrorism and imprisoned for 15 years until the verdict was overturned -- as it was about "a non-violent parent." And if Sheridan's film had been that, if it had focused more intensely on the relationship between Gerry and Giuseppe Conlon, it would have been a different film entirely. But Sheridan and co-screenwriter Terry George yielded to the temptation to stray into more dramatically conventional territory: the efforts to exonerate the Conlons and the others, and the courtroom showdown that resulted in their release. With the blurring of the facts, the film shifts into melodrama. But it's a very well-acted melodrama. Daniel Day-Lewis resorted to Method techniques -- spending time in jail and speaking with a Belfast accent even off-screen -- to get into Gerry Conlon's mind, and it's a wholly convincing performance, following Conlon from layabout to victim to victor. What there is of the troubled relationship of father and son is beautifully presented in the scenes with Pete Postlethwaite as Giuseppe, and Emma Thompson makes the most of the part of Gareth Peirce, who was not in fact so much the lone heroic defender as the script makes her out to be. In the Name of the Father holds the screen well -- if not as well as it might have if the fictionalizing choices hadn't been so obvious and conventional. 

The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002)

The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002)

Cast: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, David Dorfman, Brian Cox, Jane Alexander, Lindsay Frost, Amber Tamblyn, Rachael Bella, Daveigh Chase, Shannon Cochran, Sandra Thigpen. Screenplay: Ehren Kruger, based on a novel by Koji Suzuki and a screenplay by Hiroshi Takahashi. Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli. Production design: Tom Duffield. Film editing: Craig Wood. Music: Hans Zimmer.

There's not much chance of watching any videotape these days, let alone a haunted one, so if The Ring were remade today it would have to be ... what? A murderous TikTok? A satanic tweet? (Though maybe we've had a few of those lately.) That's just to say that horror films become obsolete quickly, unless they're made with a surer hand than Gore Verbinski's. The director strives for a sense of gathering doom in his film, using gloomy weather and isolated settings to good effect, but even the creepy video looks like nothing more than, as Martin Henderson's Noah suggests, a short made by a student in a film class. Naomi Watts is, as always, effective, and she gets good support from Henderson and young David Dorfman as the genre's familiar weird little kid. Huge talents like Brian Cox and Jane Alexander are welcome in their small roles. But the film doesn't give them enough substance as characters for me to feel concerned about their fate, and the supposedly threatening closing scene, in which it's hinted that we're all at risk because we've watched the video ourselves, falls flat.