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Restored in a new digital print, the 1973 Japanese animated drama "Belladonna of Sadness" is a trippy time capsule of psychedelia and sexual frankness.
A medieval French farm couple, Jean and Jeanne, wish to marry and ask the local lord for his blessing. The lord demands a fee, and when the poor couple can't pay it, he takes Jeanne as his court's sexual plaything. Jeanne is raped and left in tatters, then rejected by her husband as unclean. Alone in the woods, she is visited by the devil — looking rather like an erect penis — who offers her power to smite her oppressors in exchange for her soul.
Director Eiichi Yamamoto borrows from Jules Michelet's 19th-century history of satanism and witchcraft, "La Sorcière," to give the narrative the feel of a dark folktale, backed by '70s pop music (written by Masahiko Satoh and sung by Chinatsu Nakayama, the film's narrator).
The visuals, starting with static line drawings and morphing into kaleidoscopic images reminiscent of "Yellow Submarine" and Gustav Klimt paintings, capture Jeanne's transformation from sexual victim to conquerer and back again. The results are sometimes disturbing, sometimes beautiful and always fascinating.
'Belladonna of Sadness'
Opens Friday, June 3, at the Tower Theatre; not rated, but probably R for animated depictions of graphic sexuality, nudity and violence; in Japanese with subtitles; 96 minutes.