In the Realm of the Senses
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| In the Realm of the Senses | |
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 Region 1 DVD |
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| Directed by | Nagisa Oshima |
| Produced by | Anatole Dauman |
| Written by | Nagisa Oshima |
| Starring | Eiko Matsuda Tatsuya Fuji Aoi Nakajima Yasuko Matsui Meika Seri |
| Music by | Minoru Miki |
| Cinematography | Hideo Ito |
| Editing by | Keiichi Uraoka |
| Release date(s) | 1976 |
| Running time | 105 min. |
| Country | Japan France |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no Korīda, 愛のコリーダ, lit. Bullfight of Love) (Fr: L'empire des sens) is a Franco-Japanese film from 1976 directed by Nagisa Oshima.
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[edit] Summary
The film is a fictional and extraordinarily sexually explicit treatment of a true story from the 1930s in Japan, the Abe Sada story. It garnered great controversy during its release; while it was intended for mainstream release, it contains scenes of unsimulated sexual activity between the actors (Fuji Tatsuya and Matsuda Eiko, among others).
[edit] Plot
Tokyo, 1936. Abe Sada (Matsuda) is a former prostitute who now works as a maid in a hotel. She meets the hotel's owner, the sexually omnivorous Ishida, and the two begin to have an intense affair that consists of little other than sexual experiments, drinking, and various self-indulgences. Abe's possessiveness and obsessive behavior with Ishida grows to the point that she threatens to kill him if he so much as looks at another woman (including his own wife). Their mutual obsession escalates to the point where he finds he is most excited by being strangled during lovemaking, and he soon gives her permission to kill him in this fashion. She then severs his genitals and writes "Sada and Kichi, now one" in blood on his chest.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Controversy
Strict censorship laws would not allow the film to be completed properly 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 premiere in Japan (and in all prints of the film there ever since), the sexual activity has been optically censored.
The film was initially banned at its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1976, but later screened uncut; a similar fate awaited the film when it was to be released in Germany. The film was never available on home video until 1990.
Many individual scenes have been cut from the film for the sake of local censorship. The BBFC 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 was, however, available in completely uncut editions in the United States, the Netherlands, and several other territories. The film is still banned entirely in Ireland. The current United States Fox Lorber video version of this film is completely uncut and does in fact have this scene, as does the French DVD edition.
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.
[edit] Title
The title reflects the intellectual sources that affected the thought of Oshima. The Japanese title is inspired by works of Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille. The widespread Western title is derived from a Roland Barthes book on Japan; The Empire of Signs. The "In" in the English title is actually a mistake. The designer of the English-language materials for the film assumed that the "in" (dans) in the French-language production material was not referring to the stars who were in the film, but was a part of the title of the film itself. Mistake or not, the name stuck, and other versions of the film use the English naming convention for the film.
