In the Realm of the Senses [Hong Kong]

Director: Nagisa Oshima Nagisa Oshima

Overview

Based upon a true incident in 1930s Japan, Nagisa Oshima's controversial film effectively skirts the borderline between pornography and art -- making Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris of four years earlier look like children's programming in comparison. The story concerns servant and former prostitute Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda) who becomes sexually obsessed with her employer Kizicho (Tatsuya Fuji), a businessman, after seeing him making love to his wife. After making love to Sada, Kizicho becomes obsessed with her as well. As their love-making becomes more and more intense, they find themselves unable to separate themselves from each other, until every waking hour is spent in more and more dangerous sexual acts with Sada becoming more and more of the aggressor. Finally, for the ultimate in eroticism, Kizicho agrees to be strangled during sexual ecstasy for the ultimate in orgasmic fulfillment.

Product Details

Release Date:	03/04/2008
UPC:	4897007030323
Original Release:	1976
Source:	Imports
Language:	English
Sales rank:	20,780

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Tatsuya Fuji	Kichizo,O-Tsune (Yoshidaya head maid)
Eiko Matsuda	Sada,Actor
Aoi Nakajima	Toku
Yasuko Matsui	Tagawa
Meika Seri	Matsuko
Kanae Kobyashi	La vieja geisha Kikuryû
Taiji Tonoyama	Actor
Naomi Shiraishi	Actor
Akiko Koyama	Actor
Kanae Kobayashi	alte Geisha Kikuryû
Kyôji Kokonoe	Teacher Ômiya
Komikichi Hori	Mitsuwa Geisha
Kikuhei Matsunoya	Hôkan jester
Yuriko Azuma	Mitsuwa Geisha
Rei Minami	Mitsuwa Geisha
Machiko Aoki	Mitsuwa maid
Mariko Abe	Kinu (Yoshidaya maid)
Kyôko Okada	Hangyoku (young Geisha)
Kiyomi Yasuda	Mitsuwa Geisha
Tômi Mitsuboshi	Chieko (Yoshidaya maid)
Katsue Tamiyama	Fat Mansaki maid
Hitomi Fukuhara	Bullseye Umbrella Girl
Hiroko Fujino	Actor
Kazune Tomiyama	Actor
Shinkichi Noda	Actor
Kimiko Ishii	Actor
Minoru Miki	Composer

Technical Credits

Nagisa Oshima

Kôji Wakamatsu

Nagisa Oshima	Director,Screenwriter
Anatole Dauman	Producer
Tetsuo Yasuda	Sound Effects
Henri Humbert	Sound Effects
Alex Pront	Sound Effects
Kôji Wakamatsu	Screenwriter

Editorial Reviews

Shocking in its graphic sexual content and riveting in its portrayal of passion run amok, Nagisa Oshima's brilliant, notorious Ai no Korrida is a cinematic landmark. No film up to that time had seriously explored the potent gray area between art and pornography; in so doing, Oshima exposed and overturned many of the conventions of both. Like vintage Luis Buñuel, Oshima skewers expectations of "proper" art by shocking the audience; instead of Buñuel's slashed eyeballs and cross-dressing lepers, Ai presents the viewer with the actual act of sex. Oshima also exposes the voyeurism inherent in both pornography and cinema in general: virtually every sex scene (and there are many) is either witnessed by a third party or photographed through a window, so that the audience itself feels like a witness. Moreover, Oshima overturns heterosexual pornography's prevailing convention of women's serving men by having Ai's female protagonist dominate her willingly submissive lover. This story was based on a sensational true tale in which an ex-prostitute turned maid wandered the streets of Tokyo, clutching the dismembered organ of her lover after a particularly ecstatic round of lovemaking. She was quickly elevated into a folk heroine for Japan's nascent feminist movement, and least two other films based on her were made: Noboru Tanaka's masterful Jitsuroku Abe Sada (1975) and Nobuhiko Obayashi's post-modern Sada (1998). In Ai, Oshima focuses on how Sada and her lover and boss Kichi transgress all social conventions, from the hierarchical relationship between servant and master to even the distinction between male and female (Kichi at one point wears a woman's kimono and, by the film's end, Sada has a penis). Though Ai no Korrida can be viewed as part of the pinku eiga genre that was quite popular in Japan at the time, its graphic sexual content sparked a number of landmark censorship lawsuits. Sadly, it has never been seen in its native country in its unexpurgated form, though the film did garner much acclaim abroad and cemented Oshima's international reputation as one of Japan's master filmmakers. Though it has accured the musty-sounding title "film classic," Ai no Korrida has lost none of its subversive power to incite, offend, disturb, and arouse.