Sep 4, 2020
While I can see why someone else would enjoy the experience, the only thing I feel Belladonna of Sadness does particularly well is its art and even that isn't good enough to carry the movie. I swear half the movie is just stills and panning shots making the movie feel like a glorified slideshow. While I'm a fan of trippy shit, the trippy sequences in this don't do it for me in the way they did in Evangelion, Perfect Blue, or insert Yuasa work here for what I assume are budgetary reasons. The music is arguably a positive but I wouldn't consider it a major
...
selling point. There's little characterization and what's there is uninteresting which makes it hard to care about what happens to anyone.
The story is pretty bland, largely because little happens for large swathes of the movie, but unlike many "deal with the devil" stories where you might expect the person who makes the deal is corrupted morally either as a literal religious message or metaphor for the ends not justifying the means or power corrupting, Belladonna is a tragic heroine story where the woman who makes the deal is pretty much morally in the right the entire time. She is executed by her rapist, the greedy lord who's the reason Jeanne made a deal with the devil in the first place, after refusing to make a compromise and be his second in command for working with the devil in spite of only using her power to help people presumably because feudal France hated the idea of a woman having power not granted to her by a male ruler.
You can probably imagine why the movie is named after a poisonous plant named beautiful woman for its cosmetic use that also has been used medicinally and why the devil tells Jeanne that he is her and she is him. The theme of women's mistreatment in feudal France culminates at the end where Jeanne's execution plants the seeds for the French Revolution by awkwardly cutting from the mostly/entirely female crowd's face turning into Jeanne's to paintings of the French Revolution with text saying that women played a key role in it.
However, actually having a theme doesn't make the viewing experience engaging, especially one as banal as "medieval Europe had issues with women". For a movie this sympathetic to Jeanne even if the deal with the devil is meant more as symbolic of how her society viewed Jeanne achieving power without relying on the male ruler it's still awkward that she makes a deal with the devil because it makes the audience expect she'll end up more evil than she actually does. You generally don't expect a movie to portray the death of someone who sold their soul to the devil as tragic so it feels inconsistent. Her only potentially morally ambiguous acts are her helping a guy date rape the lord's wife who was complicit in his crimes and had it out for Jeanne and helping a married couple have sex for reasons other than procreation which you might recognize as one of those sins everyone ignores because it shouldn't be one in the first place like eating shellfish.
tl;dr the movie has enough going for it to not be bad but not enough for me to find it engaging but I can see why someone would get more out of it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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