In the countryside of medieval France, two peasants in love, Jean and Jeanne, go to the local baron for permission to marry. But the wedding tax has risen sharply, the groom is unable to pay, and so the first wedding night with the bride goes to the lord and his entourage. Feeling abandoned by God, the girl turns to an evil force.

4k movies reviews
What’s floating around in the bottomless depths of the Internet. Tired of basking in the resort rays of Madagascar blockbusters, amateur divers relentlessly dive into ever narrower crevices and grottos, where outlandish archaic tapes await them. By wiping away a layer of silt or breaking up ossified, dull coral, one can find completely unexpected rarities.

For example, the art-house anime ‘The Sorrowful Belladonna’, which completes the ‘Musi Pro Animerama’ trilogy, which also includes ‘Tales of 1001 Nights’ and ‘Cleopatra’. Drawn in a modernist style, Belladonna is not a classic cartoon. Rather, it is a kaleidoscope of vivid images frozen in static, with the main emphasis on the depravity of female beauty in the European Middle Ages.

The pastoral elegy of the young lovers ended in contact with local customs. The lord imposed an unsustainable tribute on the bridegroom and replaced it with Ius primae noctis. The torn bride the next morning turns to the forces of darkness, which with increasing passion drinks the juices out of the unhappy beauty. Whose life, you know, will eventually be taken at the stake of the Inquisition.

Eiichi Yamamoto’s work is a dream of horny flesh. Scarlet ribbons of blood cut the snow-white body time and again. The chic mop of hair is constantly flying in the wind. The girl does not pause for a second, all the time bending and rising in torrents of passion. On Brigitte Bardot’s puppet face, her huge eyes never blink for a moment, reflecting flashes of unholy power. The jagged rhythm of the shots pauses, then speeds up to three or four drawings per second. A lingering wailing instrumental polishes the uncertainty, dissolving the soul of the beholder.

Unaccustomed to such a picture, the eye at first cannot find the focus, frantically rushing from the characters to the barely marked scenery. Then there is a gradual sinking into the illusion of fractured contours. You are enveloped in a sticky web of sharp lines, softened a little by the lyricism of the woman and immediately bursting with new misery. Unsmiling people, a panopticon of otherworldly beings, wounded nature in sharp strokes explode the subconscious with a sense of unease. This is how a sleeping man suddenly, out of the blue, begins to rush about in anticipation of the coming disaster, unable to wake up.

The cartoon does not fit into the usual ranking system. It is very difficult to understand at the end of an hour and a half whether you liked the picture or not, whether it is good. Chaos has its own laws, but you can’t comprehend them the first time. Maybe it’s the visuals that dominate, or maybe it’s a variation on a Freudian theme. The Japanese view of European history is unusual in the angle of red shadows, and it is difficult to grasp its subtleties with the mind.

That’s not to say that the work is phenomenal in its rarity. The cartoon was once nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Japanese animation is more and more on the radar. But the film’s singularity makes it a sleeping beauty lost in a mysterious lagoon. And to meet her, you have to search for new deep maelstroms in the murky ocean of the Internet. Who knows what other discoveries of new layers await movie divers.

Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (72.1 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
Aspect ratio: 1.38:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1

Audio
Japanese: LPCM 2.0
Japanese: Dolby Digital 2.0

Subtitles
English.