In the Realm of the Senses

Reviewer: Alan Hogue
Rating (out of 5): **½

On the surface of it, In the Realm of the Senses seems a perfect failure as a pornographic film -- and it is about as pornographic as any mainstream porno in terms of what is shown (it is still censored in Japan). But Nagisa Oshima has other things in mind, although I suspect that viewers unfamiliar with Oshima's work will be hard pressed to say exactly what those things might be.

As I mentioned in my review of Empire of the Senses, Oshima is a filmmaker who considers sexual transgression to be political transgression. Now, the ways in which individuals live their lives, including their sexual proclivities and identities, can indeed have political implications, as anyone following recent developments in marriage laws in the United States knows. But to Oshima, all sexual transgression, including the violent and murdurous kind, is merely a tragic reaction to social repression.

In the Realm of the Senses is based on a notorious criminal case which occured in the context of Japan's imperialist military build up just before World War II. Although it would have been assumed that Japanese audiences at the time knew the story well, I won't give it all away here. In essence, a married man (Tatsuya Fuji) takes a prostitute (Eiko Matsuda) as a mistress, setting her up in an inn. He is attracted to her prodigious sexual appetite, as well as her immediate passionate attachment to him. He sees in Sada the intensity and sexual freedom which he lacks with his own wife, and he quickly gives himself over to this affair. But, as Oshima is incontrovertibly careful to suggest from the beginning, something is not right with Sada. She has extremely violent, jealous fantasies of mutilating her rivals, and she cannot stand to be away from him for any length of time.

The political angle to this story is suggested very obliquely. At one point Kichizo, the male protagonist, returns from the barber as troops march by. That's about it for political commentary here. He then returns to Sada only to be greeted with a butcher knife, with which she threatens to kill him. If there is any real dramatic tension in this film, it's merely in wondering in what horrible way Kichizo will wind up dead. There is absolutely no coherent political critique at all.

It is not clear to me whether Oshima saw it the way his explicators did. To hear critics of the time write about this movie, you might suppose that Sada is a meek, sexually liberated woman who plays her part in a horrible tragedy brought about by the militaristic, conformist society in which she and her lover live. But what In the Realm of the Senses actually portrays is a mysogynist cad wandering in to a relationship with an unbalanced and violent woman. Only in the most tenuous ways can this story be read as rational political commentary.

For all the wonderful work that the Criterion Collection does in making painstaking digital transfers of historically important films, and the often wonderful extras which sometimes offer fans a new and enriched perspective on the films they love, Criterion also has a tendency to include essays by haute film critics which can be a bit, to put it mildly, pretentious. This release is no exception. The weighty insert consists mostly of an essay by Donald Richie which praises the film for not being like an ordinary pornographic film. There is no detectable intent to damn with faint praise. It is hard to know what to say about such an analysis, except that it gives some insight into how the film was interpreted by audiences at the time of its release. But thankfully, the DVD also includes extensive and much more interesting interviews with cast and crew -- including a new interview with actor Tatsuya Fuji -- with many details of at least historical note. Also worthy is audio commentary with film scholar Tony Rayns.

I am very much not a critic who is given to calling people misogynists. This term is, in at least some circles, used far too often. But having now reviewed two of Oshima's most internationally famous films, it is frankly hard not to conclude that Oshima was a product of the all-too-common Freudian misogyny of his time.