dancing to death
by Douglas Messerli
Nagisa Oshima (writer and director) Ai no Korīda (In the Realm of the Senses) / 1976, USA 1977
Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses is usually described as a
“controversial” or “difficult” movie, the controversy, presumably, focused
around the question of how much sex to actually portray in a non-pornographic
movie. Many critics and audiences, particularly of its day, simply labeled it
as pornography and tried to squelch it. In the US and Britain it was hard to
view an uncut version of the film until the 1990s, when it was released on
tape. The movie, filmed in France, has still to be seen uncut in Japan. Fortunately,
Criterion has recently reissued a uncut version restored to its original
deeply-hued colors.
Thirty-seven years after its
creation, this film is surely less startling than it might have been in 1976.
But, at moments, it is still hard to watch, not because of its sexuality (and
as critic Dana Stevens has written, this is a film not only about sexuality, but is itself an image
and expression of sexuality)—almost all adults have seen penises, vaginas,
breasts, and human beings fucking—but because of where it takes that sexuality,
into the realm of the senses which go far beyond the sexual act, completely
encompassing the couple, Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) and Kichizo Ishida (Tatsuya
Fuji), to such a degree that love is moved to the arena of a bullfight (which
is how the Japanese title translates), a battle between a human toreador and
the beast within.
In the Realm of the Senses
begins with a lesbian molestation, perhaps the most normative love portrayed in
the work, and quickly moves to voyeurism and rape before moving on the
transgressive self-indulgences that include the consumption of menstrual blood,
savoring foods that have been first sauced in sexual juices, group sex, a rape
of an elderly geisha, exhibitionism, child molestation, and finally
sadomasochistic acts that increasing involve violence and strangulation, those
actions ending in Kichizo’s death, Sada castrating him, and writing out a
message in blood across his chest: “Sada and Kichi Together Forever.”
Some clearly see the couple’s complete
obsession with sexuality as liberating; Stevens describes it as precisely that,
a film that offered an alternative to the increasing militarism of the time,
1936, in which the real-life characters, upon whom this work is based, had
lived. I suppose, might I have seen this film at the age of 30 in 1977, it may
have impressed me that way. Certainly I, myself, had been quite obsessed with
sex just a few years earlier, before I had met my lifetime companion, Howard.
But today I think that is a misreading of Oshima’s work. Despite the intense
beauty of Oshima’s images, what Stevens describes as the work’s “lavish
pictorial beauty (virtually every frame could be the subject of a Japanese
erotic woodblock print),” I believe Oshima was pointing to the couple’s
obsession not as opposed to the rising cultural violence and self-destruction,
but as representative of it. Just as
in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò of a year
earlier, the behavior of the central figures (in Pasolini’s case very much
centered upon the abuse of children) gradually transform their sexual behaviors
into increasingly bizarre social interchanges that reflect the society at
large—in Pasolini’s example, the Italian fascist community—using the
characters’ plunge into death and self-immolation to reveal the societal
shifts. Oshima, in this work, has certainly not given up his political
concerns, so intensely tied up in each of his films to sexuality, just to show
us a couple that transgress the world around them. No, in their foul-smelling
cage of a geisha house, Sada and Kitchi, like the society at large, are
consuming themselves, devouring their own bodies in their increasing sexual and
violent appetites.

Although I see this film as a substantially powerful work, it is,
nonetheless, a movie about perversion. Even the geishas, none of them innocent
of sexually-defined behavior, describe the couple as “perverts.” Indeed, it is
just for this reason that it seems ridiculous to describe In the Realm of the Senses as pornography. For, in the end,
Oshima’s work is very much a moral statement, and, like so many of his films,
an attack upon certain historical moments and cultural values of his own
country.
Los
Angeles, June 28, 2013
Reprinted from Nth Position
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