Do not be ashamed of your enjoyment: In the Realm of the Senses (1976) or the stylization of asphyxia
A few months ago, in a gesture as puerile as it was incidental, I alluded to the infamous Sada Abe’s case, after brooding superficially over the psychotizing experience of loving-until-murder (Sabato/Castel dixit) and the radical split between a Marquis and his lustful proofreader. Despite the stylistic naivety, that nod to certain famous deaths by asphyxia made obvious a visual constellation articulated through a single cinematographic reference: L'Empire des sens (愛のコリーダ/In the Realm of the Senses) —IRoS onwards—, controversial 1976 Franco-Japanese film, directed by Nagisa Ōshima. The fortuitous reunion with the feature film in recent days was, to say the least, a poor justification for this resurrection experiment.
IRoS, as the specialized press has argued ad nauseam, reveals the pudendal folds of the Shōwa era, a sinuous cosmos, world of furnishings and cover-ups, of the gaze and the lack. Like the (great) Japanese cinema of the seventies, this is a story fully grounded in the dynamics of enjoyment (i.e. seeing is power). Production design itself, faithful to the Japanese landscape and architecture of the 1930s, amplifies the voyeuristic character of a system of social relations that is as deep-rooted as it is hyper-hierarchical. In this calm universe, the posture, the gestures, the gradation of the opening of the shōji, become signs of the possibility of looking; to see and be seen, in itself, is also traversed by such singularities: Sada, our heroine, however reckless, has to pay with blood for her access to a horizontal gaze.
The plot melts into the vortex of voracious affections that a mature man, Kichizō Ishida (Tatsuya Fuji), husband of the manager of the restaurant where the first half of the film takes place, and Sada Abe (Eiko Matsuda), a naive irrepressible young woman —archetypal epitome of ἐπιθυμία—, kidnap with absolute tyranny. Sada, both the flesh and blood woman and the character, had worked as a rowdy prostitute in Osaka and Tokyo, until her arrival at Kichizō’s business. Sada's turbulent past is suggested early without any major narrative investment, through the fiery way in which a homeless person recognizes her: a sweet and untroubled caress on the dirt of a glans shivering with cold.
The relationship between Kichi-san and Sada ignites from a monstrous act of masked sexual violence. The story, however, manages to pristinely ponder the dialectical return of an unspoken law of nature: the infinite erotic primacy of all femininity. The initial and initiatory preponderance of Kichizō becomes a true tour de force, ode to the impossibility of accessing a sustainable gender exploitation system. Why using your hands for violence when you can use them for pleasure?, asks Ishida right after meeting Sada, reprimanding her behavior after a fit of anger against a coworker. In this sense, the film resembles a latent metaphor about castration anxiety, which unfolds, in the earliest sequences, from the symbolic power that had been assigned to men in the Japanese society at the time, even over an armed woman.
From this initiation rite, eternal pleasure becomes the obsessive quest of the lovers. From transubstantiated orality —cigarette-fellatio— to the aesthetic enjoyment of making-music-while-copulating, or the genital baptism with the whitish syrup of his own stamp. What’s the difference?, inquires Kichi-san, an experienced sommelier, as he examines with expert fingers the sacramental wine that pales Sada, threatening, amaranthine, the repetition compulsion.
To caress a body is biting it whole with your hands and arms. Ōshima's talent makes itself felt precisely in the moments when the cinematographic narrative oscillates towards new erotic paradigms, which are not always substitute but also symbiotic. The tactile quality of the film does not hesitate to insist on a gaze recasting, now crossed by full sexual activity. It is in the retreat of Sada and Kichizō, in various ochayas, far from the restaurant and the presence of the wife, that the parallel bond of doom is consummated. The joy of looking allows the geishas who officiate the sacrament the restoration of their own chastity, sparkling and instantaneous, sponsored by the symbolic charge that is placed on the couple after the tea ceremony. The youngest of them, raped by her peers with an aviform dildo, introduces the synthesis of an exquisite orgiastic choreography.
Left to their own devices, the couple knows the excess of a perverse morning, the songs to the virility of an exhausted man, the possessive fascination of Sada who prefers to become a receptacle for her lover's excretions than to face separation: It is so obedient to you, that sometimes I wonder whose it is. Such inflammation does not allow those involved to walk in the park holding hands, like all couples in the world, but rather walk holding genitals. It consists of the transvestite and transvestient fixation that continues to be traversed by the melting pot of the sensual: two obsessives absorbed in the scent of the lover which survives in their kimonos. Towards the middle of the film, a mirror abstinence syndrome is triggered: while Kichizō rapes the maid in Sada's absence, Abe demands violent treatment from the intellectual who has required her services as a prostitute (her first profession). The searing reunion reveals Sada's childish stubbornness and the vileness with which her partner exploits her (who does not hesitate to acknowledge that he wishes to spend the money she worked for).
Right in the heart of IRoS, the culminating literary moment of Ōshima's script materializes. With the recollection and tenderness of a dinner set to music by more geishas and servants, Sada utters her radical sentence: Everything we do together, even if it is the simple act of eating, must be an act of love. The food, piece by piece, patiently submerged, guided by Abe's hand, in l'origine du monde, to conquer Kichi-san's impatient palate seconds later. The squalor of the egg, for many the most abject scene in the film, endorses another inescapable truth that does not appeal to the despair of staying trapped inside, nor to the need to squat like a hen, nor to the urgency of making Kichizō devour it moments after its release. If the chicken or the egg was first, it’s a trivial matter. In the beginning, way before the chicken and the egg, there was always sex; and, before sex, both in the present and in the originative moment when God spoke the Wor(l)d, desire.
The second part of the film is driven within the celotypical logic. Kichizō questions the engagement for the first time as he agrees to experiment with more aggressive practices in his erotic relationship with Sada. She, always more than him, allows herself a first threat of castration if Ishida don’t promise to never sleep with another woman again, not even his wife. His oath is consummated with Sada's first trophy: a pubic hair sample.
The defining separation (but not definitive) arises when the man actually travels to visit his spouse. In her absence, Sada, infinite and inordinate, seeks to hold the virile member that she has temporarily lost; to the point of violently grabbing the penis of a pre-teen, who was playing naked with another girl. You're hurting me!, shouts the kid, with a grimace of horror. Hundreds of kilometers away, Kichi-san gives in to the pressure of his wife, with the paranoid ghost of his obsessive lover haunting him, everywhere. His return to Sada's bed feels like a death penalty: I want you to feel pain, I want to hurt you. Kichizō, between fear and naivety, offers to please Sada, sealing his fate; Hurt me whenever you want, wherever you want, licking his butcher’s tears.
While the world demands a hospital’s aseptic aroma for all the corners of the Earth, the lovers, the psychosexual-hallucinated, get intoxicated by the fermentation of their remains. Sada, always capable of going further, is censored by geishas, prostitutes and maids, for her relentless voracity. Why am I disgusting?, she exclaims angrily. What's wrong with feeling the urge to always take over the body of your loved one? Precisely in this reconciliatory interlude, hardly a distraction from the unavoidable outcome, the absolute moral fracture of the movie is produced, embodied in the visit of a long-lived geisha, who offers to sing to the couple devoted to love. Sada, knowing her ongoing threat, allows Kichizō to have sex with the old woman, despite sensing her consort's repellency. The authorization of Sada, under the guise of rationality, in the psychic convolutions of her interior, is the condition of possibility of a desired flagrancy. The old geisha dies on the chore, and the lovers, drunk with perversion, mock her fate; however, Kichi-san, now more in the realm of the dead than in the realm of the senses, confesses feeling that he “took’” the body of his mother.
Up to this point, his agency.
The epilogue is devoted to the certainty of endings, a fact that terrifies Sada, almost unable to resist that her pleasure, more than her love, can find its own. The angel of death, already on Kichizō's back, suggests itself in his ashamed posture as he confronts, returning to the chamber of his mistress, the solemn faces of his compatriots who march towards a brutal war that would transform the Empire. Kichi-san, knowing that the pardon on the battlefield was just a flourish of fate in the face of the fierceness of his loved one, agrees —just arriving— to die strangled. Sada, dressed in an exquisite vermilion attire, knife between her teeth, tightly grasps the girdle of her Obi. The murder weapon. After a first anti-climatic fiasco, furious, she ties her lover’s hands, and returns to her task, laughing deranged. The belt does not give ground. His lips resemble the purple of communion wine. I'll kill you! It's monstrous, it's wonderful.
Death is presented, finally, through a photographic inversion, a subverted overhead shot. Sada gets the orgasm of her life, farther than ever, and gets lost in the confines of her mind. Only the compulsion to deal with the greatest of trophies facilitates her return to our world, manipulating the reality principle at will. To mutilate and to appropriate forever. Saw. Tear. Curtail. Chop-off. Reap. To take, by the root, the phallus and the seeds of evil. Ōshima, luckily, freed us from the myths of city pilgrimage, from the identity of the object of pleasure and the victorious sex (always feminine), from the police nibbling on the heels of a post-mortem copulation, from popular glory, from the arrested suspect and her eternal joy.
定、石田の吉二人キリ
Sada and Kichi, the two of us forever.
Maintenant unis.