Slashing The Seats

Nagisa Oshima has often used documentary styling to highlight the resonance historical events have in contemporary affairs, and this voyeuristic tale is no different. The hand held camerawork and often theatrical mise-en-scene adding a hyperreal sensibility as we follow the married Kichizo and his maid/lover Sada on their doomed affair in 1930’s Japan.

The story also stays fairly faithful to real events, seeing the deluded and sexually voracious Sada eventually found with her lovers severed penis, having committed an “ecstatic gesture of individual liberation”, and receiving 6 years in jail for her troubles, it highlighted many hypocrisies inherent in the highly militaristic Japanese government at the time, and saw Sada become something of a people’s hero.

Here the portrayal of Sada as dominant over her socially superior lover, allows Oshima to raise questions on the position of women in modern Japanese society, although this political and social narrative is often lost in a mist of highly explicit sexual scenes, causing many to label this as mere pornography, and seeing the director spend nearly four years in court arguing for the film’s release.

Sex is certainly at the forefront here, carried out obsessively by a couple searching for any form of release from the strictly stratified society they inhabit, highlighted by the detached directorial style. Here the erotic is replaced by the ritualistic, as the couple’s increasing reliance on each other leading to their eventual entrapment and Sado’s desperate and bloody resolution.

While we are invited to remain separated; voyeurs throughout, the raw sensuality on screen is impossible to ignore, and the striking visuals-inspired as much by Kabuki and Japanese classical printwork as by the often brutal nature of Japanese pornography hammer home the exploration of the country’s struggle to ally traditional values with it’s wartime allegiances and the negative effects of this on post-war culture.

Undoubtedly important, Ai No Corrida is as much an exploration of death and pain and their relationship with erotica as it is melodrama. A stylish and powerful addition to an already impressive body of work.

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