In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

In 1976, Nagisa Oshima took a 1936 tabloid murder, the Sada Abe affair, and rendered it with an explicitness no Japanese studio could legally produce. The production was registered as French, the footage shipped abroad for processing, and the resulting artifact has been argued over ever since by people who cannot agree on whether it is art or pornography. This critic finds the question tedious. What the film actually is, is a long, patient study of two people dismantling themselves in a rented room, and it has no interest in instructing anyone about how to live.

Eiko Matsuda and Tatsuya Fuji spend much of the running time unclothed and in congress, and the film treats this with a solemnity bordering on the liturgical. There is no sermon here about bodies, no affirmation, no lesson about desire as liberation. Sada is possessive, jealous, and finally lethal, and the camera watches her without defending her. Kichi leaves his wife and household for her, and the film declines to frame his abandonment as anything but appetite. The ending, in which she severs his penis and walks the streets for four days carrying it, arrives as an inevitability, not a moral.

For a viewer arriving with a checklist of contemporary social concerns, the pickings are lean. The cast is Japanese because the story is Japanese. There is no engagement with racial hierarchy, no environmental subtext, no critique of capital, no vocabulary borrowed from the last decade of Anglo-American cultural criticism. Oshima testified that nothing expressed is obscene and that what is obscene is what is hidden, a statement about censorship and not about justice. The film remains what it was: an act of formal defiance from a director who wanted to widen what cinema could show, and who had no interest in telling us what to think afterward.

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