Belladonna of Sadness (Eiichi Yamamoto, 1973) (Patreon)

For those who are still struggling with the question of whether the pornographic gaze can ever really be turned to feminist purposes, Belladonna of Sadness offers an extreme test case. Simultaneously bizarre and conventional, bound by genre and mythology while saturated in yesterday's avant-garde aesthetics, Yamamoto's film is undeniably familiar even as it seems sui generis. Belladonna combines the funky, post-hippie draftsmanship of Peter Max and Fritz the Cat with the rape-revenge ideology the defined so much of the political modernism of Japanese cinema (Oshima and Adachi, especially), and the result often looks like the bloodiest, horniest Schoolhouse Rock ever made.

So what is Belladonna of Sadness? The story takes place in an ancient feudal land, a space that resembles the Bruno Bettelheim underbelly of fairy tale timelessness. This world is ruled by a wicked warlord who demands absolute fealty, and so when the poor farmer Jean decided to marry his sweetheart Jeanne, they must report to the castle to request permission. The king's perverse wife suggests that everyone in the court have a chance to rape Jeanne, as a kind of violent assertion of the crown's absolute will. Jean is too weak to stop them, and when it is all over, he tells Jeanne "we will just pretend it never happened."

This is the first in a continual series of symbolic castrations for Jean, and while Jeanne still loves him, she resents his impotence. Seeing an opening, Satan appears to seduce Jeanne. At first he appears as a tiny throbbing clitoris with a face; in time, he expands into a priapic shaft; and in the end he displays his true form, pleading with the despondent Jeanne to become his bride. She resists, but eventually succumbs to the Devil, for one primary reason. After being raped and discarded by her community, treated like nothing, Jeanne finds pleasure and empowerment in her trysts with Satan. He encourages her sexual fulfillment, and her rage. 

As we soon learn, this horrid medieval fiefdom is partly controlled by a warped version of Christianity, one that demands obedience, suffering, and self-abnegation. By contrast, Yamamoto's Satan exemplifies the dark creed of Aleister Crowley: "Do what thou willst shall be the Whole of the Law." And in a society that regards any hint of feminine power as witchcraft, Jeanne is given the chance to flourish, becoming the Devil's emissary of pleasure and immortality.

Yamamoto's animation style often looks kitschy to contemporary eyes, but there is also an undeniable potency to his images. With sharp lines and thin pools of watercolor, he is able to suggest rich, vibrant worlds, even as his depiction of Jeanne and her goddess manifestation, Belladonna, resembles the tacky middlebrow erotica of LeRoy Neiman or Patrick Nagel. While watching the film, we can observe overtones of Edvard Münch and Gustav Klimt, and then  a second later feel as if we're thumbing through the art journal of a Goth teenager. As you might expect, cognitive dissonance results. The self-serious, heavy-eyeliner imagery is elevated in context, while Yamamoto reminds us of the seedy side of European Expressionism.

And as far as the question of women's empowerment, I suspect most viewers will arrive at a similar ambivalence. Jeanne / Belladonna is a seductive, charismatic figure, even as she radiates the high-toned smut of typical male fantasy. Her strength is inextricably linked with Jean's uselessness, his mental prison of ideology. There is a fairly generic moral at work in Belladonna of Sadness, that the feminine principle is one of chaos and disorder, the body as a force that cannot be subsumed by compulsory heterosexuality or reproduction. By this logic, Woman has the capacity to liberate the soul and bring down empires of tyranny. Trouble is, when we rely on this kind of mythologized essentialism, we have no control over its eventual deployment. The 1970s gave us Herbert Marcuse, but our current moment has replaced him with Jordan Peterson.