[Content Warning: This review discusses
rape; also, spoilers for the entire piece.]
Spoiler warnings are pointless. If you knew
every plot point before watching, Belladonna
of Sadness would still gobsmack you. More than plot, this film lives
through images, images more decadent and luxurious than even the plot
description suggests. From equal parts Klimt, Victorian fairy-tale
illustration, and Yellow Submarine,
Eiichii Yamamoto concocted a delirious feminist fable. A fable, albeit, unable
to fully articulate its vision.
Newly-wed peasants, Jean and Jeanne, cannot
satisfy the local lord’s taxes. In lieu of gold and cows, the court kicks Jean
to the drawbridge, and rape Jeanne. After Jeanne stumbles home, her husband, in
a mad rage, almost strangles her to death. Sleeping alone, Jeanne spies a
phallic pixie calling himself Satan. In exchange for her submission, Satan will
grant her power. She refuses his offer, and his next. Both times Satan rapes
her, but grants her worldly power, first financial and sexual. The villagers
cohere around her new-found power, which displeases the Lady, wife of the
rapist Lord. The Lady bristles that a commoner should have more authority than
her. She locks Jeanne a dungeon, under suspicion of witchcraft.
At Jeanne’s zenith of misery and hatred,
Satan asks for her submission. She assents, but not because she is too broken
to resist; she wants power greater than all who wronged her. After a pop-art
sex scene between Jeanne and Satan, the black death crashes upon Europe.
With her witchcraft, Jeanne cures her
village, and starts an orgiastic cult. Hearing of this, the Lord offers a deal:
reveal her secrets to the court doctors, and he will grant her the second
highest seat of nobility in the land. She refuses. She will accept nothing less
than everything. The court ties her to a stake. After feckless resistance from
the village men, the guards light the pyre. Watching her burn, all the women
villagers’ faces morph into her own. Cut to the French Revolution, where text
emphasises the role women played.
That’s just the plot. At the top, I likened
Belladonna to Yellow Submarine. They diverge in content, tone, and budget, but align
in ambition. They both aim to prove what animation can do, but what none before
had dared do.
Though I hesitate to call Belladonna animation. Sometimes
sequential illustrations give the illusion of movement, but those sequences are
sparse. Mostly, Belladonna limits
itself to static illustrations, with perhaps a pan or zoom for dynamism. Look
at any screenshot and you’ll approximate watching the film. Yamamoto does not
hide this limitation, nor does he let this limitation be a shortcoming. Belladonna begins with a black line
cutting horizontal across white. Panning left, this line accrues new lines,
forming into trees, buildings, and people. Dashes of blue appear, then pink,
then a myriad of water-colours, until there emerges a panorama. Yamamoto begins
thusly to show the audience that limited animation can still stun.
For the most part, those actually animated
sequences flow smoothly. Our first time seeing Satan, he spins in the air, fairy-like.
Other times, the animation chops from insufficient frames, but such cases seem
directorial decisions. When a manacled Jeanne marches in lock-step between
guards, the jerks of their legs add an eerie ethereality to the sequence.
In an interview on the Cinelicious Blu-Ray,
Yamamoto relates how intended to make pornography mixed with true love. If that
was the brief, the writer and animators failed on both counts. On paper, true
love is present. Jeanne does reunite with Jean, but he’s such a feckless
non-entity that the viewer feels nothing between the couple, much less love. As
for pornography: if the animators aimed for titillation, their failure was
serendipitous. Undeniably, many shots are sexual, and undeniably, many shots
prioritise the male gaze, but the film is quite un-erotic. I doubt the rapes
would arouse even a rape fetishist – there is little arousing in a woman
literally tearing in two. In those sex scenes not outright horrifying, the
WTF-ness on screen will raise gasps and chuckles before erections. The pagan
orgy explodes into literal animalism, as genitalia morph into jungle beasts.
Maybe that’s someone’s fetish, but their pleasure is very much a by-product of
the scene, rather than the core effect. Belladonna
uses sex and rape for thematic ends, without wallowing in pornography.
Belladonna
explores female subjection and liberation. Even if
its execution sometimes shades away from ambiguous into muddled, Belladonna does not settle for Manichean
didacticism. In an otherwise positive review for the New York Times, critic
Glenn Kenny accuses the film of positing the ‘power of feminine sexuality is
essentially demonic.’ This evaluation misses the film’s viewpoint,
caricaturing it as a product of a bygone ideology.
Kenny’s criticism falters by assuming the
demonic beginnings of Jeanne’s sexuality implies evil. Belladonna paints witches as enemies of the church and state. In a
pre-modern work about witches, this opposition would indeed imply witches are
harmful deviants. But Belladonna arose
in the post-modern era from a non-Christian nation; and we can see that from
Yamamoto’s less than worshipful treatment of the church. Most obviously, a
priest always stands beside the rapist Lord, exerting no force of moral
restraint.
In a scene near the end of the film, the
Lady and Lord interrogate Jeanne’s followers. A man says Jeanne rid his wife of
labour pains. In Genesis 3:16, God told Eve, and thus all women, ‘in sorrow
thou shalt bring forth children.’ Labour pains are punishment for original sin,
yet Jeanne cures them. Another woman tells the Lady her husband wants sex
nightly, but they’ve already too many children. She says Jeanne told her a way
to have sex while avoiding pregnancy, implicitly sodomy. To a puritan, such
fruitless fornication is a sin; to secular humanist, it is a matter of personal
taste. Finally, an old woman says Jeanne showed her ‘the host of hellfire
wailing for her grandson.’ Her grandson died in one Christendom’s wars. He
burns for his service to the church and state.
From the church’s perspective, Jeanne is a
devilish witch in all three cases, dismissing God’s punishment of Eve, advocating
barren sex acts, and showing old women what must be illusions of hellfire. To a
modern viewer, a humanist viewer, this all seems common sense. Of course, women
shouldn’t have to suffer labour pain. Of course, couples should be allowed to have
sex without fear of pregnancy. Of course, marching under Christianity’s banner
is no safe-guard from punishment. Vitally, all Jeanne’s ‘sins’ are decidedly fine
from a humanist perspective, that is, fine from the audience’s perspective. Though
Jeanne’s solution for the woman who wanted more sex with her husband is worded
ambiguously, I read Jeanne as encouraging sodomy. Maybe Jeanne teaches the
woman a painless method of abortion, but this would obscure the scene’s
intended effect. The scene exists to side us, humanists, with Jeanne’s
morality, and set us against the church’s morality, for it calls Jeanne’s
morality sin. While abortion is fine from a humanist perspective, in the 70s,
it was not so obviously fine as sodomy. If Jeanne did suggest abortion, some viewers
might have suspected, ‘Ah, well, she is leading the villagers down a dark path.
First abortion, then what?’ But Yamamoto ensures Jeanne’s cures are agreeable
to the audience’s morality. Her cures are not Faustian pacts, nor are they
solvents of morality; the only morality they dissolve is the archaic morality
of the church.
This is why I disagree with Kenny’s
accusation that the film views female sexuality as demonic (read: evil). If God’s
agents are not categorically good, why assume Satan’s are categorically bad.
Satan does rape Jeanne multiple times, and the film does depict these as
horrific acts, but what Jeanne does in response cannot be dismissed as horrific
because of that.
If Belladonna
does not conclude that witchcraft equals evil female sexuality, it also does
not conclude that witchcraft equals total female liberation. Under Satan’s
wing, Jeanne is undeniably more powerful and free than she was a peasant. As a
female peasant she was prey to the jealousies and lusts of other humans. As a
witch, she rules over her village, rules over pleasure and pain, and rules over
sickness and health. But the film does not paint her transformation in black
and white.
Jeanne gains liberation from the kingdom’s
patriarchal structures, becoming a sexually free and powerful witch, only after
Satan rapes her. Satan is explicitly male, and implicitly a phallus. Jeanne
escapes from powerlessness at the hands of state-protected rapists by allying
with a more powerful rapist. To be wholly accurate, the sex immediately
preceding Jeanne’s witch-hood is arguably not rape. Crushed by the world, her
misanthropy encourages her to willingly accept Satan’s patronage. Nevertheless,
Satan initiated her ruin with his gifts to her, gifts he raped her for.
Jeanne’s female empowerment results from a man raping her.
This is irony in search of a point. Maybe
the point is that patriarchal oppression is everywhere, and even in seizing power
a woman must suffer, or even exploit, said oppression. Maybe the point is her
rape by Satan awakened her to her own sexuality, or was metaphor for her sexual
awakening. (After her second rape by Satan, she grows sultry, and gains command
of her sexuality.) An unpleasant implication, but possibly present. I’m having
to stretch for these points. Ambiguity is admirable, but this is confused.
I need not say Belladonna is a difficult watch. The surreal treatment of rape can
only take the edge off so much. For those who can surmount that first obstacle,
the difficulty of Belladonna is not a
failing. Beautiful and grotesque, languorous and savage, the film’s style
redeems its budget. It even has something non-trite to say, despite mumbling a
lot of the words.
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