By contrast with the athleticism on screen, his critique of Japanese society - woven into every moment - is subtle but no less powerful. Oshima certainly has a passion for a passion, which he depicts in extraordinarily vivid detail, always beautifully, even though the necessary repetition might shock some and bore others. They finally slip towards a situation of extreme violence. Some journey, what?Īnd what of the film itself? As an innkeeper and a servant begin to consume each other sexually, he gives up his wife and, in fact his life, and the couple increasingly drift through their days with only sex to galvanise them. When I first heard about the film I had no idea it was a pornographic film, but I did know it was supposed to be some sort of.RYM Rating: 3.27 / 5. It has finally made it into our video stores in the last month, and the reason for this big screen re-release is to toast and promote that fact. In the interim, it had in fact been playing in the UK but only under club conditions.
Colors gain a huge boost and are much more vibrant than any of the previous DVD.
Just after a screening at the 1976 New York Film Festival, the film was seized by US customs officials, while it only managed to make British screens in 1991. The Criterion Collection has meticulously restored In the Realm of the Senses, and the 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 (1.66:1) encode not only presents the film in its full uncensored glory, the gorgeous Blu-ray transfer looks better than ever. Even though Oshima's early work was shot through with violence and sex, "In the Realm of the Senses" caused his fellow countrymen to drop their collective jaw and he was consequently prosecuted for obscenity, with the charges against him finally being thrown out. Set in Japan in 1936, it concerns the passionate but destructive nature of obsessive sex and is filled from first frame to last with - er - obsessive sex. 5.Those of you whose only experience of Japanese director Nagisa Oshima is through watching Tom Conti and David Bowie in "Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence" will sit bolt upright very shortly after "In the Realm of the Senses" begins. This is not sex depicted for the sake of it like the traditional Japanese 'pink film,' but it's what drives the story as it keeps going. At best it's a thinking person's XXX flick at worst it's as repetitive as a porn video with a title like 'Japanese Sluts Who Can't Get Enough, Vol. In the Realm of the Senses creates some sort of a motif with the sexuality, in a somewhat similar manner to Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris.
Director Nagisa Oshima manages many scenes of tender and dangerous erotica the film isn't bad by any means - never a dull moment, as they say - but neither is it the great radical work you may expect after all those years of awed reviews. The affair turns sadomasochistic as the couple push themselves towards the ultimate ecstasy.Īctually, if you approach this as a sick comedy about a guy getting way more nookie than he can handle, right up to the gut-wrenching logical conclusion, the movie plays better. Sada, it turns out, is sexually insatiable he can never have enough erections to satisfy her. He makes immediate advances towards her, having no idea what he's getting into. Elko Matsuda is Sada, a former whore who goes to work as a geisha in the house of Tatsuya Fuji. It's based on a real, notorious incident in Japan in 1936. The first couple of instances of explicit copulation take you by surprise, but after a while the incessant rutting becomes numbing, as it's probably meant to. What we have here, folks, is art-house hardcore porn. Banned at the New York Film Festival! Acclaimed as an erotic masterpiece! Can any movie live up to decades of this kind of hype? Well.