A Film Canon

A forerunner of contemporary art porn, In The Realm Of The Senses plays like a sexually liberated Mizoguchi, condensing the notorious sado-masochistic relationship between Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) and Kichizo Ishida (Tatsuya Fuji) to a near-continuous, unsimulated sex scene, much of which still plays like hardcore pornography. Like most great pornographers, Oshima understands orgasm - specifically female orgasm - as a cinephilic moment, and it's this that drives his idiosyncratic reading of the strangulation and castration that concluded the relationship, which is shown in graphic and unflinching detail. On the one hand, Sada's body is presented as a single, orgasmic surface, a kind of distributed clitoris, that puts her on a continual threshold between pleasure and pain; the sheer fact of female orgasm as torture porn. Accordingly, her fantasy is presented as masturbatory - first, externally, as the desire to have a penis for a hand, and then internally, as the desire to be a hermaphrodite, the longing for a penis and vagina that can be in continual, loving proximity. On the other hand, Kichizo gradually adopts a submissive, masochistic position, opening up his body to the pain that will presumably heighten pleasure to a female degree - and, accordingly, his fantasy is presented in similar terms, first as the desire for a vagina, and finally as the desire that the head of his penis might take on a clitoral intensity. In both cases, there's a focus on dexterity rather than penetration, a suggestion that it takes something as delicate as a hand to effect the exchange and negation of genitals required, and fuse clitoris and glans into a single, eleventh fingertip - and it's this manual contact that imbues the film with both its delicacy and striking palette, as an opening, fetishistic menstrual scene might suggest. At the same time, the strangulation scenes draw on a pervasive, startling analogy between vaginas and mouths to establish a direct nervous connection between genitals and throat, until orgasm annihilates and granulates the voice. In fact, it feels as if the couple's ultimate desire is to manipulate, handle and fuse their voice boxes into something as disembodied and strange as the lute music that takes place both in and around their sexual activity - a score that forms part of a wider, understated mileu that abstracts Sada's experience as geisha, prostitute and maid, presenting her sexual explorations as drawn from the same dexterous base as the tea ceremony. It's a chilling insight into how an austere aesthetic culture breeds perversion - a critical scene takes place against a march of Showa soldiers - as well as an extraordinary eroticization of the Japanese ceremonial proclivity for the floor, which becomes the film's ultimate polymorphous surface, as the couple roll, tumble and fornicate from room to room, and even from building to building, in a trajectory only the tatami-shot can evocatively capture.