Craig J. Clark
For Valentine’s Day, we’re once again looking at the wide variety of onscreen relationships: movies about ill-fated couplings, toxic partners, and unconventional romances, to help offset the sticky-sweetness of the season. Follow along here.
A little over a third of the way into In the Realm of the Senses, Kichi, an innkeeper engaged in a torrid affair with Sada, one of his serving girls, is left alone at the inn where they have taken up residence while she prostitutes herself to pay for their ongoing assignation. As the inn’s hostess tidies up, she urges Kichi to run away, saying, “If you stay, she’ll end up killing you,” but he shrugs off her advice. She’s not telling him anything he doesn’t already know. Once he learned just how possessive and insatiable Sada was, he knew she would eventually be the death of him.
A transgressive film from the era that yielded such provocations as Last Tango in Paris, The Night Porter, Salò, and Maîtresse, 1976’s In the Realm of the Senses is one of director Nagisa Oshima’s most notorious films in a career with no shortage of controversy. Several of his early features touched on the student protest movement that arose in opposition to the United States—Japan Security Treaty, culminating in his departure from Shochiku when 1960’s Night and Fog in Japan was abruptly pulled from release and suppressed due to its political content. Going the independent route suited Oshima’s temperament just fine, and he spent the next decade tackling all manner of hot-button issues in features and television documentaries alike. He also became a cornerstone of the Art Theatre Guild alongside Shohei Imamura, Toshio Matsumoto, and Masahiro Shinoda. There was a sea change in the works, however, when Oshima was approached by French producer Anatole Dauman about making a pornographic film for the international market.
The idea intrigued Oshima, and Dauman’s track record (including multiple films by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Jean-Luc Godard) signaled his was no fly-by-night operation after mere titillation. When Oshima came back to Dauman with two potential projects, they settled on the story of Sada Abe, which was familiar to Japanese audiences since it took place just before the Second World War and was highly publicized. Taking as his primary source the official court records (which also informed the softcore “pink eiga” film A Woman Called Sada Abe from 1975), Oshima crafted a tale of erotic obsession that grows in intensity the longer its central couple stays together. To be free of Japan’s strict censorship regarding nudity and sex, he and his technicians went to extreme lengths – shooting on a closed set, importing film stock from France and shipping it back undeveloped – and that was only possible after they found actors willing to bare all and then some.
As Kichi, Oshima cast Tatsuya Fuji, a well-known action star who made dozens of films for Nikkatsu and was one of the few actors who didn’t balk at the physical demands of the role. For Sada, he chose relative unknown Eiko Matsuda, who wound up getting typecast and retired after a few years of failing to break out of the sex film ghetto. That’s a shame, as it’s clear from her fearless performance as Sada she had the chops to do more. In the Realm of the Senses rises and falls on Fuji and Matsuda’s dedication to the project and unselfconsciousness before Oshima’s camera, which went places no Japanese film had dared go before.
Curiously, at the outset, Kichi is the aggressor, abusing his power as Sada’s employer to have his way with her (so long as his wife doesn’t find out). As much as he’s incapable of keeping his hands off her, though, once the tables are turned, she’s the one who can’t keep her hands off him (specifically, his member). It’s also significant, in light of her final act after she’s strangled the life out of him, that the first time he saw her, he complimented her on her hands while she was holding a knife. This bit of foreshadowing would be redundant for most Japanese at the time, but Oshima’s film endured heavy cuts, resulting in his own countrymen having to travel outside of Japan to see the uncensored version, which still hasn’t been released there to this day. Familiar territory for Oshima, who toned things down for his second collaboration with Anatole Dauman, 1978’s Empire of Passion, which won him Best Director at Cannes.
As for the story of Sada Abe, it received another airing in 1998, when Hausu director Nobuhiko Obayashi took a stab at it. His Sada is highly stylized, exploring her backstory to relate “the unknown aspects of Sada’s life.” It also follows her after she removes her dead lover’s genitals, which she carries around for a few days before finally being arrested. When Kichi, in Realm of the Senses, tells Sada, “My body is yours. Do as you please with it,” that probably wasn’t what he had in mind.
“In the Realm of the Senses” can be viewed in full on the Criterion Channel. It is also available on Blu-ray.
