#readmore because I ended up typing 1673 words about this -_-

[millennialdemon]

Upon finishing Cleopatra: Queen of Sex, I am left with one simple, rather frustrating question to have at the end of any movie: What was the point?

I can’t help but compare it to Belladonna of Sadness, the film following this one in the Animerama trilogy, and lament Cleopatra’s apparent lack of purpose or narrative vision. Because while Belladonna of Sadness is quite a troubling movie to me personally – I simply cannot call it feminist, and I find it harder and harder to not just admit it is really, very misogynistic despite Eichii Yamamoto’s attempts to grapple with feminist ideas therein – I cannot say it wasn’t trying to impart a meaning, or even that it didn’t succeed in doing so. It was very squarely, definitely, about something. I came away from Belladonna of Sadness shocked, sad, and sympathetic – even if that sympathy was and is still conflicted.

On the other hand, Cleopatra: Queen of Sex left me puzzled and somewhat disgusted, and I don’t even think it was on purpose. And yes, I’m a 28 year-old harpy woman feminist whatever, of course I took umbrage with a 70s cinemax porno anime movie, what did I expect? But that really didn’t even turn out to be my main complaint. In fact, that didn’t even make it into the Top 3 problems I have with this movie, which are as follows:

3. Cleopatra, kind of like Jeanne now that I think about, didn’t actually have much agency and just sort of reacted to the story unfolding around her, despite being the main character. This is exacerbated by having her actions be controlled by another, much more wicked older woman throughout who is doing all of the planning for her.

2. The time-travel framing narrative was completely nonsensical, unnecessary, and went ignored for the vast majority of the movie.

and 1. The ending of the framing time-travel narrative is in complete opposition with the preceding 1 hour and 40 minutes of the story.

Now, I said that the time-travel framing narrative went ignored in the majority of the movie, but that isn’t technically true. If you must know, the time-travellers passively sitting inside of the brains of the ancient people – and a leopard – did contribute One thing to the story throughout: raunchy, absurdist humour. The man inside of Cleopatra’s pet leopard seemingly kept his consciousness somehow, since he was a perverse dunce that facilitated bestiality jokes, just as he did before he got stuck inside the body of an ancient leopard. What a blessing. Thank you Tezuka, for showing me various images of a wacky cartoon leopard trying to have sex with human women.

The other time-travellers ended up in the bodies of humans, a roman slave and a young woman who was a close friend of Cleopatra’s. They, for some unexplained reason, were not consciously controlling the bodies they are inside of, nor were they able to investigate anything despite that being the main conceit of this journey. The roman slave is able to craft explosives and, ridiculously, a handgun, but he has no idea how he knows how to do these things or why he is compelled to. He says vaguely, “someone in my heart is telling me how to do this” and “I made this on impulse, I have no idea how it works”. The young woman does not feel any similar impulse or have access to hidden future knowledge – she may as well have never been possessed at all. Her life goes on exactly as we would assume it would had she not been.

All of the things these three characters do, whether they had been possessed by time-travellers who do nothing anyway or not, could have simply not been done at all and nothing in the story would be very different. History would have played out the same way regardless if the roman slave won his coliseum battle by shooting his opponent with a handgun, and other similar absurdities. Cleopatra steals that handgun afterwards and threatens to kill Calpurnia with it for stealing away Caesar, but Calpurnia convinces her otherwise by showing her that Caesar doesn’t love her, so Cleopatra doesn’t even end up using the gun to change the outcome of history. And need I even explain how whether or not the leopard wants to hump various women doesn’t matter at all, beyond facilitating crude humour, the same way the imagery of a roman slave holding a glock facilitates absurdist humour in this movie?

And it was still not necessary to include them even for the sake of just facilitating humour. There are tons of elements in this movie that are purposely “out of time and place” for the sake of absurdity. All the montages of fine art parodies from around the world, the scene of the various famous statues that have Caesar’s likeness forced onto them after he becomes emperor, Caesar’s assassination playing out like a Japanese stage play. Caesar literally returns to Rome with Cleopatra in a red sports car. This movie never claimed to be aiming for any sort of historical accuracy – we even got a disclaimer about that right off the hop! – we didn’t need any reason for the roman slave to be able to craft a gun, or for the leopard to be horned out of his mind, or the girl to do… nothing…

Functionally the only thing the time-travel framing narrative did was render this movie meaningless in the end. The reason the time-travellers went to the past was to figure out why an alien race on an alien planet called Pasateli, which Earth is trying to conquer, have named their plans for rebellion against Earth “The Cleopatra Plan”. They watch the real Cleopatra’s life unfold in ancient Egypt, and return to the future saying that they now understand what the “The Cleopatra Plan” might be.

The aliens of Pasateli have been sending beautiful women to Earth to seduce the earth men and then, when they are vulnerable, kill them. Upon discovering this, earth launches missiles to Pasateli to destroy it, and the movie ends.

But Cleopatra was not a conniving, wicked woman trying to destroy mankind – this movie does not present her as such. She was being guided and pressured by Apollodoria, and even so, she resisted her demands and fell in love with both of the Roman leaders she had been tasked with assassinating. For an hour and 40 minutes we watch this story about this poor woman who cannot bear to kill the men she loves, not even for her beloved Egypt. Even when Caesar betrays her love, she does not plot revenge or kill him where he lay – she runs away in sorrow. And after Antony dies in his battle against Octavian, helped by Apollodoria’s meddling and poisoning, Cleopatra tries to run away and live in solitude, saying she wants to go back to the way she was before and live a normal life. But Octavian chases her down, helped by the vengeful Apollodoria, and Cleopatra dies when her desperate final attempt to assimilate with the Romans for the sake of survival fails against Octavian, who is immune to her charms because he is gay. (And by the way, in this mess of a story, what is that supposed to mean?)

Similarly, the Egyptians of the movie were clear victims, analogous with the aliens of Pasateli whom Earth was trying to conquer. After Cleopatra committed suicide, faced with being captured and executed by Octavian and having no choice but to do so, the young Egyptian woman one of the time-travellers ended up inside of screamed and cried and begged for the Romans to leave Egypt. That is how the story that takes place in ancient Egypt ends, with an Egyptian woman begging for the conquerors to leave them alone. And then we hard cut to the future and the time-travellers just glibly say, Oh, the Pasateli are trying to destroy us by seducing our men, just like Cleopatra did! Even though in this story, she didn’t.

It is awful. It is insanely misogynistic. It is weirdly conspiratorially racist and brings to mind the bogus “great replacement” theory that neo-nazis insist is definitely real and happening (it isn’t). It makes no sense.

I could try to spin it differently, and try to make a bold claim that this movie is actually about how humans never learn anything from history. How else can you justify none of the time-travellers, particularly the woman who had resided inside of the mourning Egyptian, not pausing and asking: Wait, are we the baddies? Are we the Roman conquerors that drove the titular Cleopatra to desperate measures and an early demise? Are we the villains incapable of witnessing and understanding the violence we are perpetuating even when it is staring us directly in the face?

But that’s a hard sell and one I cannot actually endorse, because this movie did nothing to earn that interpretation beyond have bafflingly bad writing that forces you try to make sense of it. And because there is a comedy scene wherein Egyptian women band together and plot to exhaust the Roman soldiers in Antony’s army with sex prior to his battle with Octavian’s army, ensuring he loses. And it works.

So was this time-travel framing narrative worth witnessing for the sake of laughing at the horrendously rotoscoped anime heads atop live-action actors in a kitschy sci-fi lab? Not in my opinion, no, even though I do love to see animators experiment and I do love feeling like I’m going insane sometimes. And while I can appreciate the artistry of this movie – and there is a lot of it to enjoy! – I have a big problem when a story like this is so contradictory. And no, it being an experimental adult movie from the 70’s doesn’t absolve it of having bad, confusing writing and being dissatisfying.

4/10 for some compelling visuals and a lot of experimental animation that kept things fresh, but it was majorly dragged down by a story that was a little too careless to just be dumb entertainment.