| Review:
|
While the Japanese Imperial Army marched through Tokyo
in 1936, fanning the flames of fascism and raising flags
and guns, geisha maid Sada Abe was seen wandering the streets
in a state of rapture waving the freshly severed genitals
of her married lover Kichizo. Agreeably strangled by Sada
during pursuit of the ultimate sexual high, Kichizo very
likely left this world horizontally and with a painful grin
on his face. This real life, mysterious incident, which
would have kept U.S. tabloids hyperactive for months, was
preempted by the Japanese advance into a not quite unrelated
but infinitely bloodier flirtation with militarism and World
War II. But master director Nagisa Oshima resurrected the
story four decades later in 1976 with In The Realm Of The
Senses, his daring plunge into the first artistic porno
film ever and perhaps the most erotically controversial
movie of all time. And which is still censored in its own
country.***
Oshima, who was only a teenager during World War II,
but who's been profoundly influenced as a filmmaker by those
years, brilliantly constructed In The Realm Of The Senses
as sexual expression of the consequences of fanaticism and
imperialism on the Japanese soul and flesh. Baring much
more than bodies, Oshima delved deeply into subconscious
carnal desires under the influence of society, and the eternal
human contradictions between liberating sexual impulses
and erotic enslavement.***
Oshima, himself a contradiction as eminent Japanese
movie legend and the most notorious bad boy of cinema in
defiance of conservative Japanese traditions, poses with
In The Realm Of The Senses the philosophically seductive
question: Does a form of government dictate the way people
have sex? And Oshima has expressed amusement about Western
claims to know all about the Eastern mind in general. Especially
American journalists who have made a habit of interpreting
the boundless sexuality of In The Realm Of The Senses as
a rebellion against Japanese inhibitions. He has made clear
that his interest is more in raw instincts, and the connected
social and political motivations beneath the layers of social
etiquette. ***
In the film, Sada is a young prostitute laid off at
a brothel, who has to start at the bottom of the food chain
as a maid at a new one run by a married couple. The husband
Kichizo routinely samples the women on a whim, and grabs
Sada one day while she's scrubbing the floors, "overwhelmed
by the thought that her irresistible hips must have made
men weep." Though Kichizo only intended her as an appetizer
to one of the in-house geishas, he's bewitched by her sexual
insatiability.***
At first Kichizo is content to marvel at her sexual
addictions, sitting back with a cigarette and commenting
how strange Sada is while pleasuring him. And when secrecy
from Kichizo's wife becomes too annoying, he stashes Sada
away in a secret sex nest across town. Obsession soon becomes
an exhausting ordeal, with the couple thinking about giving
up eating and sleeping as distractions from a thirst for
pure erotic appetite. Eventually roles start to reverse,
with Sada as the sexual aggressor and Kichizo viewing her
as a 'man eater' who has taken possession of him sexually.
And while the couple becomes ever more isolated, virtual
prisoners of love in pursuit of superhuman sexual pleasure,
they grow increasingly estranged and hostile to the world
around them, abusing, assaulting and raping the servants
who just want to come in and change the sheets. Drunk on
lust and in a perpetual sexual stupor, for them public sex
around town becomes no big deal. For purposes of pleasure,
it's the surrounding special effects that count.***
They're soon lured into the final unexplored realm:
sado-masochism and lots of rough sex. Kichizo craves to
be strangled, his suffocation heavily symbolic of the couple's
hermetically sealed world, and the rest is history.***
The real clue to the film's symbolism is in its more
politely suggestive, alternate title, 'Empire Of The Senses.'
For Oshima, the sexual fixation of his characters is surely
not in opposition to, but parallels national values. With
intimate human activities linked to social behavior, a deep
connection forms between obsession and fanaticism. Feudal
notions of absolute worship and mindless obedience are manifested
in the couple's relationship, along with self-isolation,
insularity, suspicion and a predatory attitude toward the
outside world, which also characterized Imperial Japan.
Here, the assisted sexual suicide of Kichizo is not unconnected
to kamikaze fever, and also potentially interchangeable
is the unhealthy worship of an emperor or a lover's sexual
equipment.***
Oshima told me in an exclusive interview that "the
biggest influence on me as a filmmaker was the defeat of
Japan in WW II. Perhaps the basic feeling it left me with
is that this world is absurd." The director talked about
his involvement as a rebellious leader in student movements,
and how he has been a target of censorship by government
authorities as a defiant independent filmmaker. (In The
Realm Of The Senses was smuggled secretly into France for
editing, banned in Japan, and seized by U.S. Customs just
before its scheduled screening at the 1976 NY Film Festival).
"It was an age of change in Japan after WW II, so we expected
Japan would change very much. But all that happened is that
it became Americanized." "Everything went back to the past
and we were very disappointed, we fought this tendency.
Also, the war in Korea started, and we feared the return
of Japanese militarism, so we fought Japanese authority.
We wanted to destroy conventional morality in Japan, and
we expected to find something new. I thought my filmmaking
and my existence itself was a form of social protest."***
Oshima, who in person startles with his level of intensity
and energy for a senior citizen, has a passionate commitment
to his art that seems to well up from the same uninhibited
sensuality that saturates In The Realm Of The Senses. It
nearly borders on the auto-erotic, in a cerebral kind of
way.***
|
