You Love to See It: In the Realm of the Senses

There comes a point somewhere toward the middle of In the Realm of the Senses, Nagisa Ōshima’s fictionalization of the real-life story of lovers Sada Abe and Kichizo Ishida, when the act of fucking becomes the most boring, soul-sucking thing imaginable. This is not to suggest that the film is somehow lacking, or that its scenes of unsimulated sex are anything but scorching and deeply human. The sense of boredom In the Realm of the Senses fosters is in fact integral to its appeal, mimicking the kind of hypnotic tedium overindulgence of any kind inevitably produces. Nerves become frayed, stomachs full, minds and bodies saturated by repeated rushes of powerful emotion. Sada and Kichizo are raw flesh pressed together, the friction of their frottage preventing the formation of new skin.

This same wearing away of resistance affects the viewer, too. The film’s sex scenes become longer, more frequent, more focused on detail. The same acts and positions recur. The same emotions. The same threats. In the Realm of the Senses channels the particular folie à deux of its subjects as a form of hyperfocus, reducing the scale of their world to a single rented room Sada won’t even allow the boarding house’s maid to clean. The filth, to her, is proof of their love, a symbolic cum stain on the world’s hem. We wade through it in her wake. The clean, elegant lines of the film’s early acts gives way to a chaotic, exhausting sprawl. It becomes more mentally and physically rigorous to parse each shot, and all the while Sada’s fixation on Kichizo’s body pulses steadily beneath the movie’s unwashed skin.

To invite viewers into an experience like Sada and Kichizo’s is something most directors would never so much as attempt, but by layering sensation over sensation, motion over motion, Ōshima creates a film you can almost smell. The annihilating power of watching Sada desperately pursue a total and unending sexual union with her lover first overwhelms, then induces a numb, nauseous indifference as its mechanics become clear. Real synthesis cannot occur between static objects; to achieve it, the human personality must be rendered down like molten fat and stirred together with another soul until their admixture is nothing more than so much steaming, undifferentiated sludge.