Blind Beast is based on a short story by Edogawa Rampo, a classic Japanese mystery writer whose nom de plume is a Japanese misrponunciation of Edgar Allen Poe, who was Rampo's literary hero. A very fine film about his life was distributed in the USA a few years ago as Rampo or The Mystery of Rampo (1994), & a couple of his stories occur as mini-films within that larger film. There's a collection of Rampo's tales in English from Tuttle, which I read so long ago it's hard to remember the tales, except "The Chair" which stuck most in mind, & has some of the same masochistic extemism of Blind Beast.
This arty tale of sadomasochism approaches being some sort of pompous soft core porn but never really falls over the edge. It's excesses are too heartfelt to seem merely pompous. Since even now it is a most unusual tale of sexual obsession & madness, it must have been all the more radical for 1969, although seriously treated sadism tales are not as unusual for Japanese cinema. In some ways Blind Beast plays a reversal on the Kobo Abe novel & film, Woman of the Dunes, in which a man is kept captive in the bottom of a sandpit with an ant-tiger of a woman for his lover.
In Blind Beast, a famed bondage photographer's young model is kidnapped by a blind psycho momma's boy & held captive in his iron art studio/prison. The studio is an expressionist environment of heaped up giant statues of eyeballs, noses, arms, legs, breasts, & a central landscape of female torso. Visually this is quite stunning.
At first the blind beast's captive, Aki (Mako Midori), struggles by means of psychological warfare against her captor, Michio (Eiji Funakoshi), as well as his demented mom (Noriko Sengoku). I was captivated by the expressions on her face as she cajoles & manipulates & scores points, knowing as she does that she can speak with an enticing tone & Michio can never see that she's glowering at him with her own brand of menace.
But at some point the young woman's inate masochism begins to be her key motivation, whether because she has gone mad as she said would happen to her in captivity, or because it really is the best she can make of a bad situation. By the time her bid for power over the blind beast has won her the complete authority she had sought, escape is no longer consequential.
Though insane, Michio is also naive & immature, & would do almost anything for his captive -- except let her go. Through her he wishes to act out & create his philosophy of a new art form which is totally tactile. When the "touch" performances become sexual, then Ępain-oriented, it is only a short step to scarification & vampirism, practiced in the darkness of Michio's weird studio as Aki cajoles & Michio weeps like the eternal momma's boy he remains.
There are many moments that for all their dementia are almost spiritual, as when the captive goes blind in sympathy with her captor. It's hard to convey by mere synopsis what a fine work of art this is, as it takes subject matter that is usually pure exploitation & makes it into something unexpectedly great.
The ending is one of the most beautifully disburbingly grotesqueries I have seen in cinema, though other films do come to mind that equal it, & those are also Japanese, such as Oshima's Empire of Passion (1978) or the version of Double Suicide (1978) starring a young Kaji Meiko, perhaps best known as Lady Snowblood (1973) cribbed by Terentino for Kill Bill.
Blind Beast could easily have been merely a vulgar tacky film, but the extremism is still sufficiently Rampo's to be literature. Director Yasuzo Masumara was a star of the New Wave Cinema of the time, & in the horrific romance of Aki & Michio, Masumara created an erotic horror film that is transcendent in its perversity.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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