In the Realm of the Senses (aka Ai no Corrida, “Bullfight of Love”) is a 1976 Japanese-French film directed by Nagisa Oshima and starring Eiko Matsuda and Tatsuya Fuji.
The film is a fictionalized version of the true story of Sada Abe, who in 1936 Japan was arrested for the murder of her lover. She was found carrying his severed penis and testicles in her kimono. The film makes this a story of doomed lovers in a hostile world.
In 1936 Japan, Sada Abe works as one of the maids at an inn. An elderly man on the street recognizes her from her days as a sex worker. The other maids, once friendly, now look down on her for previously being a sex worker. Kichizo, the inn’s owner, defends her, and he initiates an affair with her, despite both being married.
They conduct their liaisons at other inns around the city. Much of this film takes place in the single rooms occupied by Sada and Kichizo. Sometimes they include in the geisha women sent to play music and sing for them.
Perhaps the best word to describe Realm is “intimate”. Much of the film is just Sada and Kichizo together in a small room, and the mise en scene favors closeups of the lovers. Add to that the full frontal male and female nudity, and explicit shots of penetration, and the viewer feels directly involved with them.
Sada is married to a respectable but much older man. When Sada has to spend time with her husband, she is cold until she thinks of Kichizo. Then she aggressively demands that her husband slap her and dominate her. Compared to the usual stereotype of Japanese female sexuality, Sada Abe is a revelation of female sexual assertiveness (apart from, you know, killing her lover). She is both sadistic and masochistic in her desires. The story also shows that other women, such as Kichizo’s wife and the geisha who entertain the couple, have sexual desire.
As Sada grows more assertive and sadistic, Kichizo becomes more passive, submitting to her. At first, he doesn’t take Sada’s moments of jealousy and violence seriously. When she threatens him with a knife, he criticizes her choice of blade. In their later trysts, Kichizo is on the bottom and Sada on the top. He lets her do as she pleases with him, even as she speaks of wanting to possess him. He even brings up the idea of her strangling him, to enhance sex, and she takes up the idea enthusiastically.
In one of the later scenes, Kichizo walks down a street, alone, in the opposite direction from a column of marching soldiers. He looks down, his face grim. Perhaps he has intuited what is coming.
In the Realm is set in 1936, just on the brink of the Japanese expansion into Asia and the Pacific which would eventually lead to WWII and the devastation and conquest of Japan. While the rest of their world is sliding into militarism and the destruction of war, Sada and Kichizo have their own private utopia: just the two of them and a room. This fits the “make love not war” ethos of the 1970s, though complicated by way the lovers bring death with them. (This also makes it reminiscent of The Night Porter.)
Kichizo’s ultimate submission to Sada, when he lets her strangle him to death during intercourse, with her on top, is framed as his gift to her.
As one of the few sadistic women in cinema, Sada’s sadism grows out of her own obsessive desire to possess her lover, and in a Freudian sense, she has actually acquired Kichizo’s penis.
