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DIRECTED BY: Nagisa Ôshima

FEATURING: Tatsuya Fuji, Eiko Matsuda, Aoi Nakajima

PLOT: A concubine starts a passionate affair with her master in 1930s Japan.

COMMENTS: When a movie starts with a girl trying to force her way into another girl, you know you will probably have a sexually explicit tale. And while Senses is not hardcore pornography, sex and eroticism play the major role here. One sexually charged encounter follows another, as we follow our young prostitute heroine and her relationship with her master, a middle-aged nobleman and owner of the house where she lives and works with other girls. The development of this relationship proves increasingly disturbing as sex transforms into power play, a game of submission and dominance, while the young girl gradually reveals her more possessive self.

Oshima’s infamous sexual psychodrama shocked on release and remains today a classic of provocative cinema, a transgressive and bold narrative portraying sexuality as a power play. While we cannot consider this movie weird, there are elements of the bizarre. Sexual activities increasingly take on a riskier and more sadomasochistic bent. A few intrusive scenes expressing the characters’ states of mind offer a dreamier aesthetic and a healthy dose of Freudian symbolism. And the graphic climax still shocks sensitive spectators.

In today’s cinematic landscape, however, none of the above is too extreme. Contemporary Asian extreme cinema  approaches similar subjects, namely erotic obsession and the relationship of the two sexes, in more shocking ways. Kim Ki Duk’ s movies, especially Moebius, come to mind, featuring similar imagery and then some. Keeping that in mind, Senses feels a bit dated and mild. The underdeveloped characters and their simplistic or incomprehensible (or just unexplained) motives do not help anything.

In the Realm of the Senses is available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film invites scorn not only because it depicts almost every sex act you could ever want to imagine taking place—God help us—between a man and a woman (right up to and including a woman inserting pieces of mushroom into her vagina and letting them marinate in her lady juices before serving them up to her man; because if he wants more, it must be true love), but also because it dares to couch the entire hedonistic-masochistic exercise as a cinematic cipher, an oozier version of what, deep down, happens in every relationship.”–Eric Henderson, Slant

(This movie was nominated for review by “Der Ubermolch.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Where to watch In the Realm of the Senses