Nagisa Ōshima
L'Impero dei Sensi

After killing him in his sleep, asphyxiated by the sash of his kimono, and then severing his penis and testicles, Abe Sada, in Japanese characters, wrote, with blood, on his body, things like: "Abe and Kichi, the two of us".

At the time of her arrest, "Sada claims that Ishida's penis was the dearest memory she had of him and that she tried to have a relationship with the mutilated penis of her lover, but without success."

Abe Sada has become over time an iconic figure in twentieth-century Japanese culture, the chronicles recount how she even aroused an unexpected (and in some ways still surprisingly today) empathy in Japanese public opinion, enough to earn her a trivial sentence given the facts; and the bloodthirsty affair of extreme passion and death, which, never as in this case, are found tied to a single and tight thread (Eros & Thanatos), one of the most famous and paradigmatic related to the Land of the Rising Sun. So much so as to inspire books, documentaries, and two films: Abe Sada - The Abyss of the Senses, which few know, was the first, but was completely overshadowed by the most famous and extreme film of the affair and in general the filmography of one of the greatest and iconoclastic authors of Japanese cinema, Ōshima Nagisa.

In the Realm of the Senses is a film that, in its exceptional reconstruction of time and environment, in its rigid indoor framing, in its formal and chromatic refinement, in the rawness of how it shows real sexual relationships, possession, and possessiveness, alienation from the social context in the name of an all-encompassing erotic charge brought to the extreme consequences, consisting of increasingly daring and "sick" practices, is capable of carving a groove in the so-called erotic filmography, hitting much harder than Last Tango in Paris and resulting powerfully, in its timeless affair, even today in the times of von Trier and Noé.

Of French-Japanese production (where the film could never have been shot as it is, but in France, at the time, hardcore cinema had been cleared), it could only be Ōshima to film this work that, naturally, as is known and in the order of things, was opposed and censored almost everywhere. Together with the other great anarchist of the Japanese New Wave (a comparison with Godard and company, not completely out of place regarding the experimentation with forms and language, but in reality, historically forced) Wakamatsu Kōji, here the producer of the scandalous film.

Among the anthology scenes, how not to mention the one with the egg, but films like this one, revolutionary in its methods and in any case, however you want to put it (never before had a film containing unsimulated sex scenes been distributed in the normal channels of auteur cinema, and the very beautiful Pinku eiga of the '60s were not so explicit), continue to strike and fascinate today because Abe and Kichi are two emblematic figures suspended in time and space, belonging to every era and social class. To whom Ōshima gives poetic depth well beyond mere chronicle. The ending, thus, takes on a tone of conscious and shared sacrifice, rather than due to jealousy (a component that is always, however, fundamentally present). And, as I mentioned initially, Love and Death, never like here, represent a single material, a completion of one another.

"I believe a film is made because you encounter something. From this encounter, you receive an emotion. What do you encounter? There are three possibilities: the works of others, the news events, and oneself."

With In the Realm of the Senses, Ōshima reached a central point in his work, the culmination of a path begun in the previous decade already with extraordinary films such as, among many, The Pleasures of the Flesh and The Ceremony (to mention two that I believe are among the most significant in this regard), which he resumed only a couple of years later with his "brother" film In the Realm of Passion (a work, this one, with the same protagonist Tatsuya Fuji​, evocative, more visionary, but less extreme and accomplished, and above all Soft rather than Hard). Then, of course, on to Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Max Mon Amour, up to the final chant of Taboo, among samurais, (homo)sexual urges, and tales of rain and moon. Other stories, other masterpieces, also to be told. To be totally loved.

And, to anyone who has not yet begun or had the chance to explore the works of this great author, I suggest you make amends, perhaps now, almost five years after his passing.