To be a bit more specific, Realm of the Senses is that great theoretical ideal that all of the filmmaking intelligentsia of the 1970s kept driving itself: it is the great example of Artistic Porno. There have been attempts, as long as the film has existed, to somehow reclaim it from the category of pornography, often with the assumption that "art" and "porn" are mutually exclusive categories. But trying to redeem Realm of the Senses from the shameful genre of porn is, I think, to completely misunderstand what it is, what it's doing, and why writer-director Oshima Nagisa made it. The film shows, almost to the exclusion of any anything else, unsimulated sex scenes; the mechanics and fluids involved in sexual intercourse are depicted with unabashed physicality in close-ups and wide shots; and the really important part is that, unlike virtually every other artistically nuanced film containing explicit sex that I can think of, Realm of the Senses has no obvious interest in circumventing our proclivity to finding its sex scenes pleasurable and arousing. It's not prurient, and the grimly transactional feeling that characterises what most of us probably think of as "pornographic" is absent. But it is erotic, and even given the brutal place it winds up, it never feels for a nanosecond that sexual ecstasy is something for which its character or its audience deserve to be punished. That's far, far rarer in cinema throughout the world than explicit onscreen sex itself.
If I understand things correctly, the idealised Japanese audience that has never been able to see the film in the form Oshima wanted would have known exactly where things were going from the start, so allow me to give away the ending: Realm of the Senses is based on the true story of Abe Sada (Matsuda Eiko), who in 1936 killed her lover Ishida "Kichi" Kichizo (Fuji Tatsuya) by strangling him during sex, and cutting of his genitals to take with her as a memento. Oshima's movie trades, heavily, on our knowledge that things are heading in that direction (there's at least one moment of explicit foreshadowing that is, honestly, a bit more corny and leering than a film of such sensitivity and subtlety deserves), but only for purposes of strictly sex-positive humanism. In fact, that In the Realm of the Senses never seems to struggle with balancing self-positivity and a narrative it knows in advance ends with death and dismemberment is, in and of itself, one of the most impressive things about a movie that's basically 102 straight minutes of immaculately controlled filmmaking.
The film's narrative focus is conscribed to the point that it feels like fine lace, defined more by the holes it leaves than what's present. Starting right around the time that former prostitute and current maid Sada meets Kichi while cleaning his home, and the rest of the film consists of virtually nothing other than scenes of them having sex, or the time immediately before and after. Whatever domestic narrative passes between these events is alluded to but never shown; the tense political situation in Japan (the film takes place in the shadow of a failed coup d'etat by certain military leaders, less than three months before Ishida's death; war with China was just a year in the future) at the time is occasionally visible in the background, but it's never the focus. We have, in effect, just enough of a sense of everything that's not Sada and Kichi's increasingly intense sexual assignations to be particularly aware of how much the film isn't paying attention to that everything.
In the context of a culture with as defensive and repressive a relationship to sexuality as Japan - Oshima not only couldn't screen the film there, he couldn't even make it, legally, meaning that the negative had to be brought to France to be developed and edited - this focus on sex as a mutually satisfying and empowering act that requires no kind of narrative or social grounding was itself a bold social statement. Oshima being a reliably, perhaps even exclusively political filmmaker (I've seen only a small handful of his films, but that's the clear connective tissue between them all), it's unsurprising that for him, depicting explicit sex would be a primarily political consideration, and particularly considering its production and distribution woes, In the Realm of the Senses proves to be a uniquely powerful swipe against the culture it depicts. As Sada and Kichi's relationship grows increasingly isolated, it too grows less ashamed and mannered, finding more extreme limits of ecstatic violence and what would be called "aberrant" behavior, if it weren't for the fact that the sex itself is, in a sense, considered "aberrant" in context.
The film isn't exclusively driven by social concerns, though that is its primary focus. It's equally driven by character; and if there's any way in which this explicit, erotic film made almost solely out of sex scenes can rightfully be described as non-pornographic, or even anti-pornographic, it's in the way that it uses sex as a means of building character. Considering how little we actually see them do, we get a strong sense of the two leads, Sada especially (and how much more still can be said about the way that this taboo-busting indictment of Japanese sexual morality fixes specifically on an empowered woman in full ownership of her own desire, contrary to the norms of an especially male-dominated culture?). Part of what the film achieves for itself with all of that nudity and unfaked intercourse is a degree of relaxation and closeness with the characters. When Sada playfully bats at Kichi's penis, we're seeing two people who are totally comfortable with each other enjoying a quiet moment as much as we're seeing sex play (and, for that matter, Matsuda and Fuji have to have been fairly at ease with each other and the crew to be so guilelessly naked for such long stretches). Oshima and cinematographer Ito Hideo's strategy of close-ups and acute angles means that our focus is as much on whole bodies as on genitalia, and we're encouraged to think of the two characters relating to each other as people in love and lust, not just as thrusting, penetrating body parts interacting.
The visual scheme of the film is, overall, quite particular and intentional. It subscribes fully to a very Japanese-specific geometric language with its costumes and sets deliberately suggesting a more archaic time period than the one in which the story takes place; though I am sure it wasn't Oshima's intention (regardless of the film's subsequent history, it's hard to imagine his hope was ever for this to be renowned internationally and unseen in his native country), the overall effect to Western eyes, trained to anticipate a certain kind of Japanese cinema, is that it looks very characteristic of that nation's most important cinematic imports. There's a squared off "room as frame" technique used fairly often that immediately recalls the work of Ozu Yasujiro; the more emphatic cut-ins and sharp angles tend to accentuate the same and depth of cubed spaces, rather than work against them. Take any given frame, and it reads as "Japanese"; except that most of those frames have copious nudity. There's no inoculation against the intellectual disjunction that causes, no matter how much cinematic nudity one has seen. The visual language it subscribes to is almost exclusively used (especially in Ozu, but in plenty of other filmmakers of that generation), to insist on a kind of formalism and mediated approach to drama; In the Realm of the Senses explodes that formalism by virtue of what it depicts.
There is, essentially no distinction between form and content here. The way it depicts the actions it shows and the thoughts it has about what those actions mean are indivisible. It is all about the frank appreciation of sexual behavior in all its extremes, and the firm belief that what brings mutual pleasure to the participants cannot possibly be obscene or licentious or unworthy of visual depiction. The way it moves through its story is so minimalistic that it's almost easier to think of it as an experimental film than as a narrative; but a tremendously successful experiment it is, staged with beauty and complexity and psychological thoughtfulness that I have, personally, seen in no other film on anything resembling the same subject.
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