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In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no Korīda, 愛のコリーダ, lit. Bullfight of Love) (Fr: L'empire des sens) is a Japanese film from 1976 directed by Nagisa Oshima.
Summary
The film is a fictional and extraordinarily sexually explicit treatment of a true story from the 1930s in Japan, the Abe Sada story. It garnered great controversy during its release; while it was intended for mainstream release, it contains scenes of unfaked (i.e., hardcore) sexual activity between the actors (Fuji Tatsuya and Matsuda Eiko, among others).
Plot
Tokyo, 1936. Abe Sada (Matsuda) is a former prostitute who now works as a maid in a hotel. She meets the hotel's owner, the sexually-omnivorous Ishida, and the two begin to have an intense affair that consists of little other than sexual experiments, drinking, and various self-indulgences. Abe's possessiveness and obsessive behavior with Ishida grows to the point that she threatens to kill him if he so much as looks at another woman (including his own wife). Their mutual obsession escalates to the point where he finds he is most excited by being strangled during lovemaking, and he soon gives her permission to kill him in this fashion. She then severs his genitals and writes "Sada and Kichi, now one" in blood on his chest.
Themes
The film does not so much examine Abe's status as a folk hero in Japan (the film A Woman Called Sada Abe explores this theme more directly) but rather the power dynamics between Abe and Ishida. Many critics have written that the film is also an exploration of how eroticism in Japanese culture is often morbid or death-obsessed. Oshima was also criticized for using explicit sex to draw attention to the film, but the director has stated that the explicitness is an integral part of the movie's design.
Controversy
Strict censorship laws would not allow the film to be completed properly in Japan. To get around this, the production was officially listed as a French enterprise, and the undeveloped footage was shipped to France for processing and editing. At its premiere in Japan (and in all prints of the film there ever since), the sexual activity has been optically censored.
The film was initially banned at its premiere at the New York Film Festival, but later screened uncut; a similar fate awaited the film when it was to be released in Germany.
Many individual scenes have been cut from the film for the sake of local censorship. The BBFC granted the film an "18" certificate (suitable for adults only), leaving all of the sexual activity intact, but ordered that a shot showing a prepubescent boy having his penis pulled as punishment be optically reframed so that the act itself was not shown. The film is, however, available in completely uncut editions in the United States, the Netherlands, and several other territories. The film is still banned entirely in Ireland.
Title
The title reflects the intellectual sources that effected the thought of Oshima. The Japanese title is inspired by works of Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille. The widespread Western title is derived from a Roland Barthes book on Japan; The Empire of Signs.
The "In" in the English title is actually a mistake. The designer of the English-language materials for the film assumed that the "in" (en) in the French-language production material was not referring to the stars who were in the film, but was a part of the title of the film itself. Mistake or not, the name stuck, and other versions of the film use the English naming convention for the film.
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