Themes: Self-Destructive Romance, Star-Crossed Lovers, Servants and Employers
Main Cast: Eiko Matsuda, Tatsuya Fuji, Aoi Nakajima, Yasuko Matsui, Meika Seri
Release Year: 1976
Country: JP/FR
Run Time: 105 minutes
Plot
Based upon a true incident in 1930s Japan, Nagisa Oshima's controversial film effectively skirts the borderline between pornography and art -- making Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris of four years earlier look like children's programming in comparison. The story concerns servant and former prostitute Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) who becomes sexually obsessed with her employer Kizicho (Tatsuya Fuji), a businessman, after seeing him making love to his wife. After making love to Sada, Kizicho becomes obsessed with her as well. As their love-making becomes more and more intense, they find themselves unable to separate themselves from each other, until every waking hour is spent in more and more dangerous sexual acts with Sada becoming more and more of the aggressor. Finally, for the ultimate in eroticism, Kizicho agrees to be strangled during sexual ecstasy for the ultimate in orgasmic fulfillment. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
Review
Shocking in its graphic sexual content and riveting in its portrayal of passion run amok, Nagisa Oshima's brilliant, notorious Ai no Korrida is a cinematic landmark. No film up to that time had seriously explored the potent gray area between art and pornography; in so doing, Oshima exposed and overturned many of the conventions of both. Like vintage Luis Buñuel, Oshima skewers expectations of "proper" art by shocking the audience; instead of Buñuel's slashed eyeballs and cross-dressing lepers, Ai presents the viewer with the actual act of sex. Oshima also exposes the voyeurism inherent in both pornography and cinema in general: virtually every sex scene (and there are many) is either witnessed by a third party or photographed through a window, so that the audience itself feels like a witness. Moreover, Oshima overturns heterosexual pornography's prevailing convention of women's serving men by having Ai's female protagonist dominate her willingly submissive lover. This story was based on a sensational true tale in which an ex-prostitute turned maid wandered the streets of Tokyo, clutching the dismembered organ of her lover after a particularly ecstatic round of lovemaking. She was quickly elevated into a folk heroine for Japan's nascent feminist movement, and least two other films based on her were made: Noboru Tanaka's masterful Jitsuroku Abe Sada (1975) and Nobuhiko Obayashi's post-modern Sada (1998). In Ai, Oshima focuses on how Sada and her lover and boss Kichi transgress all social conventions, from the hierarchical relationship between servant and master to even the distinction between male and female (Kichi at one point wears a woman's kimono and, by the film's end, Sada has a penis). Though Ai no Korrida can be viewed as part of the pinku eiga genre that was quite popular in Japan at the time, its graphic sexual content sparked a number of landmark censorship lawsuits. Sadly, it has never been seen in its native country in its unexpurgated form, though the film did garner much acclaim abroad and cemented Oshima's international reputation as one of Japan's master filmmakers. Though it has accured the musty-sounding title "film classic," Ai no Korrida has lost none of its subversive power to incite, offend, disturb, and arouse. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
In the Realm of the Senses(Japanese: 愛のコリーダ,Ai no Korīda?, lit. Bullfight (Spanish: Corrida) of Love;[1]French: L'Empire des sens) is a 1976Franco-Japanesefilm directed by Nagisa Oshima. It is a fictionalised and sexually explicit treatment of an incident which occurred in 1930s Japan, that of Sada Abe. It garnered great controversy during its release; while it was intended for mainstream release, it contains scenes of unsimulated sexual activity between the actors (Tatsuya Fuji and Eiko Matsuda, among others).
The British title of the film is In the Realm of the Senses, while the U.S. version is Realm of the Senses. The French title L'Empire des sens (Empire of Senses) is derived from that of Roland Barthes' book about Japan, L'Empire des signes (Empire of Signs, 1970).[1]
Synopsis
In 1936 Tokyo, Sada Abe (Matsuda) is a former prostitute who now works as a maid in a hotel. The hotel's owner, Kichizo Ishida, molests her, and the two begin an intense affair that consists of sexual experiments, drinking, and various self-indulgences. Ishida leaves his wife and family to pursue his affair with Abe. Abe becomes increasingly possessive and jealous of Ishida, and Ishida more eager to please her. Their mutual obsession escalates to the point where Ishida finds he is most excited by being strangled during lovemaking, and he is killed in this fashion. Abe then severs Ishida's penis and writes, "Sada Kichi the two of us forever," in blood on his chest.[2]
Controversy
Strict censorship laws would not have allowed the film to be completed as per Oshima's vision in Japan. To get around this, the production was officially listed as a French enterprise, and the undeveloped footage was shipped to France for processing and editing. At its première in Japan (and in all prints of the film there ever since), the sexual activity has been optically censored.
In the USA, the film was initially banned upon its première at the 1976 New York Film Festival, but later screened uncut; a similar fate awaited the film when it was to be released in Germany. The film was not available on home video until 1990.
Many individual scenes have been cut from the film for the sake of local censorship. For example, the British Board of Film Classification granted the film an "18" certificate (suitable for adults only), leaving all of the sexual activity intact, but ordered that a shot showing a prepubescent boy having his penis pulled as punishment be optically reframed so that the act itself was not shown. The film has been made available, however, in completely uncut forms in France, the United States (including the current The Criterion CollectionDVD), the Netherlands and several other territories.
In Canada, when originally submitted to the provincial film boards in the 1970s, the film was rejected in all jurisdictions except Quebec. It was not until 1991 that individual provinces approved the film and gave it a certificate. However, in the Maritimes the film was rejected again as the policies followed in the 1970s were still enforced.
Themes
The film does not so much examine Abe's status as a folk hero in Japan ("Pink film" director Noboru Tanaka's film A Woman Called Sada Abe explores this theme more directly) but rather the power dynamics between Abe and Ishida. Many critics have written that the film is also an exploration of how eroticism in Japanese culture is often morbid or death-obsessed. Oshima was also criticized for using explicit sex to draw attention to the film, but the director has stated that the explicitness is an integral part of the movie's design.
Influences
The movie has had a lot of influence on BDSM thinking and philosophy, themes of which run through The House of Correction, a novel by Bernard J. Taylor in which the only way a lawyer can ultimately prove his love and assuage the obsessive jealousy of the woman he loves is to sacrifice his manhood for her. The movie is referred to in the narrative.
^Durgnat, Raymond (1985). "In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no Koriida)". in Frank N. Magill. Magill's Survey of Cinema: Foreign Language Films; Volume 3. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press. pp. 1475–1479. ISBN0-89356-243-2.
Buehrer, Beverley (1990). "In the Realm of the Senses (1976) Ai no Koriida". Japanese Films: A Filmography and Commentary, 1921-1989. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland. pp. 222–225. ISBN0-89950-458-2.
Marran, Christine (2007). "Why Perversion Is Not Subversion: Tanaka Noboru's The True Story of Abe Sada and Oshima Nagisa's In the Realm of the Senses". Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 150–161. ISBN0-8166-4727-5.
Patrick T.M. Kenny, “Conflicting Legal and Cultural Conceptions of Obscenity in Japan: Hokusai's Shunga and Oshima Nagisa's L'Empire des sens.” Earlham College thesis, 2007.
Durgnat, Raymond (1985). "In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no Koriida)". in Frank N. Magill. Magill's Survey of Cinema: Foreign Language Films; Volume 3. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press. pp. 1475–1479. ISBN0-89356-243-2.
