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In the Realm of the Senses Actors: Tatsuya Fuji, Eiko Matsuda Director: Nagisa Oshima Number of Items: 1 Picture Format: Pan & Scan Format: Color Audience Rating: X (Mature Audiences Only) Running Time: 105 minutes Studio: Fox Lorber Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2002-07-23 Buy from Amazon |
 "Pornography? It doesn't matter!"I don't want to try and write any kind of review about whether or not this movie is pornography. Frankly, it doesn't matter whether or not is pornographic in nature. I don't even care that there was as much sex in it as there was. What bothers me is simply this: there isn't a story. I watched this movie after hearing many different things from many different people--I was told that it was a beautiful story about love, a disturbing story about obsession, a freaky naughty movie, and a brilliant artistic movie. People told me all these things and I watched it hoping to see strong characters and a powerful plot. The graphic sex isn't my complaint. Or even the fact that Oshima filmed real sexual acts instead of simulated ones (although that is, to me, a very troubling fact). My complaint is that the movie is an hour and forty minutes, but only about five minutes of that time is spent trying to get us to have any compassion for the characters. The rest of it is spent on sex scenes that never seem to work together to create any semblance of a story. What are their motivations? Who knows--it seems like they just want to have sex. Their dreams? Who cares--they're having lots of sex. Are they in love? Who could tell--all they do is have sex and obsess with each other. What are their personalities like, I wonder? You'll never figure it out--the movie spends all of two scenes trying to describe what kinds of people our hero/heroine are. The best I can understand is this: the woman likes to have lots of sex (I'm not being repetitive here--that's actually the line of dialogue that comes out of her mouth), and the man... well, they didn't really talk much about him. But my guess is that his personality involves sex. If you want a movie that is disturbing, then by all means watch this one. Oshima does a great job of creating something bizarre and disjarring, but he hardly creates something important (or even entertaining). By the end of the movie, you don't feel as if you have just gained anything from viewing it. Instead, it feels like you've just watched two people have lots of sex... and that's about it. People have made much of the beauty of this film, but it is neither erotic or meaningful. With flat characters and non-stop sex sequences (not to mention the aimless, gratuitous rape scenes), it seems less like a movie and more like a documentary on the Nature channel. Swap the Japanese setting with the Serengeti and you'll quickly find yourself wondering why we're calling this movie such a wonderful achievement in cinema. ...  "May Float Your Boat or Sink Your Ship"Many of you looking at this particular item might be well aware of foreign cinema, in all of it's delightfully un-Hollywood sentimentality. If you've seen the movie - which I'll assume some of you have - you might have already formed a very specific opinion about it. Perhaps the reason why is because the subject matter is very extreme, and it'd be more than a little difficult to walk away and not feel something. Initially, I was disgusted. I changed my mind, and I thought I'd share my reasoning here. First of all, let's say for the sake of argument that the world has various standards when it comes to morality in any film dealing with adult issues. Some of you may have seen Lars Von Trier's "Dogville" and thought to yourself: "That's one skewed paradigm." Be that as it may, it's no less plausible than the cinematic - or philosophic - paradigm of Steven Spielberg. My point here is that we all look at and engage realities in a different way - and Japanese cinema is no different. In his revelatory book "Eros in Hell," Jack Hunter explores Japanese "pink cinema." This film is among hundreds produced in an odd era of Japanese filmmaking. Comparable with American "blue movies," pinku eiga moved to explore the boundaries of s*x as art, but also the psychological implications between the graphic evidence. It'd be easy to refer to this genre of filmmaking as horror/pornography; the more difficult path is examining it in the same light you might examine a film by Adriane Lyne or David Cronenberg. Their general aesthetic is curiously akin to Japanese pink films. So here's the breakdown: this film is, in my opinion, an exploration of s*x as statement which is then turned on it's head to direct it's audience in considering the right questions. These comparisons are primarily in reference to the climactic scenes in each - where our hero and heroine (in spite the difficulty with which they hold the title) pull out of the outside world completely into some kind of isolated space. Up to this point we've seen our protagonists weather scrutiny and obstacles to be fulfilled. In fact we - the audience - have done most of the scrutinizing and castigating. I know I wasn't rooting for these people for the better part of their respective stories, but I felt as if I were driving them away into reclusiveness by lacking compassion for them. Only when each set of characters are alone do we start to feel less accusatory and unforgiving. We realize - or so the hope might be - that their's is a deep spiritual bond. One you might expect to see between to loveable Hollywood starlets in a romantic comedy. But that isn't exactly the way things are. Though this example is relatively melodramatic, you can understand why they have arrived at such an intimacy. They've reached that place with each other because we, the audience, didn't believe they could. We passed them off as s*x-crazed sociopaths. And honestly, they were. But I think a real interesting point the film made to me was how deeply they were connected in spite of the superficial s*xuality. This is a hard-learned lesson, and one you'll have to dig deep for. But consider for a moment that America doesn't own the patent on love stories, and that additionally love stories aren't always cute or clean or pure. Perhaps from the filmmaker's perspective love was an ugly, dirty thing - until it existed in a place where it was solemnly understood. And without the world coming down on the protagonists - from without the constraints of society or the status quo - their particular kind of love was much easier to understand. I'm not saying that you'll instantly say to yourself: "Hey, wait a second... that was just love, not graphic s*x." I just took it with a grain of salt and thought of it as a near-parody. The fact of the matter is that you can point out blatant exaggerations in a great deal of Japanese contemporary media, and this film is no exception. This obviously does not solve the problem of "just too much graphic s*x for my liking." "The Night Porter," directed by Liliana Cavani, is somewhat less intense. That isn't to say it's devoid of intensity, or that you'll have a nice dinner-date movie on hand. It is to say that the s*xual content is far less prominent - and miraculously it gets the same point across in it's decidedly more watered-down, Western way. And as far as I'm concerned, that message is "intimacy can't be readily depicted in cinema without alienating the audience, because ideally - intimacy is a very exclusive thing." It takes a patient person to watch "In The Realm of the Senses." It takes a lot of courage to appreciate it. However, save for the actors (or in the case of "In the Realm..." the real-life people it was inspired by) - don't expect anyone to completely understand the intimacy. This film will haunt some of you with that prospect.  "I HAVENT SEEN THIS YET..."....BUT I HAVE READ MOST OF THE REVIEWS...I THINK THE POINT I AM TRYING TO GET ACROSS IS THAT THIS WAS NOT MEANT TO BE A PORN...IT WAS MEANT TO BE ART...JUST BECAUSE MODERN AMERICAN SOCIETY VIEWS NUDITY IN FILM AS WRONG OR IMMORAL, DOES NOT MEAN THERE'S ANY REASON TO DOWN A FOREIGN FEATURE WHERE THIS IS AN EVERYDAY ISSUE...THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME... "Not bad acting at all, Maddona was right for once..."There is defintely a movie here and not just about sex. It's about passion and needing over coming ones mind, and I'm sure we've all felt that way at one time, of course maybe it wasn't in Feutal Japan, but at some point. There's such a deep story here, and whenever the couple were away from each other I thought they would kill whoever was near them, because they needed each other so much. The Lead Actress shows her skills of what it's like being a sexaholic, and the Lead Actor shows how easily it is to be overcome by a woman. Anyone who rates this as a bad movie didn't actually think about the movie at all, and just counted the sex scenes (which there a lot of) but that's even sicker than watching for the sex scenes. "Not worth the time or money"After reading some of the other reviews I was expecting a film that would leave me thinking about something of significance in life, even if was an extreme reaction to sexual obsession. I also, often forlornly, hope for a cathartic experience whenever I watch drama. Unfortunately, this film provided neither. I was left thinking that there was something left on the cutting room floor that would explain the actions of the main characters. There was little in the film that would help me understand how the two `lovers' could end up in their final situation. It was northing more than a voyeuristic following of a couples' series of sexual experiences that were neither erotic nor enlightening of motivations. Then there were those unexplained forays by the female lead that had nothing to do with the main theme of the movie. The only reason for them seemed to be "comic relief" to the sex. The problem is that they were not funny and did not inform the audience about the main character. Over all, the only reason to watch this film would be to see what really bad movies are like. |
