Based on the 1931 novel by Edogawa Rampo (the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired pseudonym for Hirai Tarô), Blind Beast concerns an aspiring model, Aki (Midori Mako), who’s kidnapped by a blind sculptor, Michio (Fukanoshi Eiji). She’s kept prisoner in a bizarrely appointed studio within an isolated warehouse, while Michio fashions a statue of her, a work that he vows will inaugurate a new “art of the touch.” Michio, as it turns out, is also something of a mama’s boy, his uncomfortably close relationship with his mother (Sengoku Noriko) constituting the third angle in a supremely perverse triangle of relations.
Rampo worked within a genre called ero guro nansensu, or “erotic grotesque nonsense,” and Blind Beast could certainly be described by the first two of those adjectives. But what director Masumura Yasuzô and writer Shirasaka Yoshio want to get at runs far deeper than pure nonsense. This is signaled early on by the art exhibition where Aki first glimpses Michio. A sign on the wall states that the exhibition is called “Les Fleurs du Mal,” the name of Charles Baudelaire’s groundbreaking collection of Symbolist poems. As the title indicates, Baudelaire wanted to find beauty in evil, disease, and decay, which is also Masumura and Shirasaka’s m.o. throughout Blind Beast.
The striking monochromatic photographs of Aki that line the exhibition walls show her in various nude poses, frequently wrapped in (and constricted by) heavy chains. The BDSM element hinted at here will come to full fruition in the film’s increasingly unhinged, and heavily sadomasochistic, third act. For now, photos that isolate parts of Aki’s anatomy presage the fragmented décor of Michio’s studio, with each wall decorated by numerous sculptures of disembodied female body parts. All of these themes and visual strategies are almost subliminally established within Blind Beast’s first five minutes.
The first two acts of Blind Beast play out like one twisted psychodramatic chamber piece, as Aki pleads, chastises, and eventually slyly cuddles up to the inexperienced Michio, who, despite his criminal actions, seems at first more pathetic than pathological. With regard to two giant, headless sculptures of nude females that serve as the studio’s only furniture, Aki at one point pronounces: “I get it now! They’re done from a baby’s perspective!” In a later scene, Aki hammers away at the notion that Michio’s mother harbors a thinly veiled incestuous desire for the son whom she’s kept isolated and innocent to the ways of the world.
The death of Michio’s mother signals the film’s shift into fetishistic fantasia. Only by shedding the last vestiges of family, and any thought of the outside world, can Michio and Aki proceed on their erotic journey to the end of the night. It may seem like indulging in an ill-advised trope to have Aki turned on by (and then fall in love with) her rapist, but this objection misses several points: Much as Michio’s artistic project is inseparable from his erotic explorations, Aki’s arousal is contingent on her slowly developing blindness, which places her in the same realm of the senses as Michio, whose program she eagerly adopts. Such a dismissal also neglects the fact that, from this point on, Aki assumes the active role; she takes over her own narrative and thus establishes the agency to fully explore her own innermost desires.
At first, this involves little more than whips and chains, as though recapitulating the Helmut Newton-inflected BDSM imagery from the opening exhibition. But Blind Beast is all about transgressing boundaries, so the lovers press on. What results is an escalating series of sadomasochistic exchanges, as Aki and Michio claw, bite, and slice one another with various implements, eventually going so far as to drink each other’s blood. This predation further strips away their humanity and reduces them to the level of beasts.
Still, the lovers seek to go further into the fragmentation and dissolution represented by the incorporeal body parts on the wall. Such notions of the erotic as ineluctably linked to death suggest not only the work of the Marquis de Sade, but also the “dissident surrealist” Georges Bataille, whose transgressive 1928 novella Story of the Eye can be seen as a spiritual precursor of sorts to Blind Beast. As Aki intones in disembodied narration over footage of her own demise: “Those who venture to the edge of such worlds, can expect only a dark, dank death to envelope them.” Against the social upheaval of the late 1960s, Masumura’s film seems to suggest that only such a despairing inward journey, with its absolute rejection of human bondage, remains an option for these artistically inclined renegades.
Image/Sound
Arrow Video’s HD transfer of Masumura Yasuzô’s Blind Beast improves significantly on the 2001 DVD from Fantoma, with denser black levels and a noticeable increase in depth and delineation of fine details, especially during the frequent extremely low-lit scenes. That said, grain levels in these scenes can get pretty thick, though never enough to be really distracting. The Japanese LPCM mono audio track reveals a more dynamic range than the mix on the Fantoma release, with less hiss and high-end tinniness.
Extras
The commentary track from Earl Jackson is very academic, but at least the Asian cinema scholar loosens up partway through the track. The content, though, is consistently informative, covering themes dealing with bodies and the body politic that recur throughout Masumura’s work, the contributions of the three leads, the significant changes made during the adaptation process, and how Masumura handles the film’s sadomasochistic concepts. In a video introduction, critic and author Tony Rayns discusses Masamura’s early interest in law, years studying film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Italy, the subsequent lack of influence Italian neorealism had on his films, and his apprenticeship as an AD under Mizoguchi Kenji and Ichikawa Kon. The visual essay from Edogawa Rampo expert Seth Jacobowitz covers the notion of sadomasochism as developed by Richard Krafft-Ebing (and its derivation from what Goethe called “supersensualism”), how Blind Beast straddles the line between arthouse fare and pink film, and its similarity to historical incidents like the case of Abe Sada, which inspired Oshima Nagisa’s In the Realm of the Senses.
Overall
Surreal and ceaselessly subversive, Masumura Yasuzô’s Blind Beast explores the outer limits of eroticism and the human senses.
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