Reviews

Provacative, surreal, and psychedelic, this is a film unlike anything I've seen before. The artstyle, sometimes muted, washed with watercolor dripping down the screen, and other times loud with vivid reds and greens that pop out at the viewer, is as beautiful as it is haunting. The animation, minimal at best, is slightly choppy but surprisingly very fluid during very specific scenes. It all feels purposefully done, as if to make those scenes stand out even more than the others. The music also serves a very large role, other than the instruments helping to convey the tone of the scene, often the singer will serve as a dual narrator, as if to spell out the melancholy of the main character as well as the crossroads at which she stands.

This isn't going to be a movie for everyone. I'm going to get that right out of the way first and foremost. This is an arthouse film which employed some very experimental techniques at the time, ones which Toei Productions would later employ when they coined the term "ga-nime" (an extremely niche and often overlooked style of production which was unpopular and never wide spreading). However, at the heart of Belladonna of Sadness is an experience which reminds me of an emotionally charged, more narratively driven Angels Egg (mostly in its execution, but also religious imagery). If you've seen that film, you'll understand how each scene flows into the next with an almost dream-like fever, but that the story is mostly up for interpretation. I'd argue that the message and the story of Jeanne (the main character of Belladonna of Sadness) and her downfall is very straightforward despite its surrealism.

The story starts with a marriage, but after the lord demands more taxes than the husband can pay, his lady proposes that the virgin wife have her purity tainted. After that, nothing is the same for Jeanne as her life spirals after being reduced to an artform for the eyes of lustful men. One criticism I see often is that there's a romanticized depiction of her and every assault she suffers, however, I'd argue that depiction is strongly symbolic to how she is viewed vs how she views herself. During the latter half of the movie after she makes a deal (won't spoil it), her body is like a temple, but spirals in many scenes to be this twisted, unholy mass of flesh. And yet, despite all this, one thing I loved about her is that she was still willing to help others even when her cynicism and emptiness became like posion.

I wouldn't call this a love story. I wouldn't even call this a story of revenge. I don't say this often because I feel the term has become synonymous with certain unsavory women who's extremism has become laughable and reduced to a caricature of what the movement stood for, but this movie has a strong feminist message. I could carry on about the meaning of the phallic imagery throughout, or even her face transposed over the other women in the crowd at the end, but this review is already long. I will say as a closing, however, that it's the impact of the story of Jeanne which inspires me, and why I love the ending so much.

TLDR; if you enjoy morality tales laced with tragedy and experimental anime, this might be for you—but if you're not enjoying it after about 30 minutes, then drop it