There are films like dreams: the very idea of shooting them seems unimaginable. It is as if each shot emerged from the imagination of their creator and was printed directly on the film, without going through reality – that rock against which the greatest cinematic ambitions often founder. This is precisely the effect produced by The Empire of the Sensesby Nagisa Oshima (1976), a block of lava, an insane film, which comes out in a sumptuous 4K restoration, integrated into an extremely comprehensive box set that we owe to the publisher Carlotta: a fascinating booklet signed by the critic Stéphane du Mesnildot, a wealth of precious documents and bonuses, to which are added two very beautiful films, The Empire of Passion, by Nagisa Oshima (1978), and The True Story by Abe Sadaby Noboru Tanaka (1975). An editorial gesture that is worthy of the film and its importance, and which places this dream in its aesthetic and political context.
It all starts with a news item that took place in militaristic Japan in 1936. And with a woman, Abe Sada, whose life was paved with many misfortunes: unfit for bourgeois marriage because she was raped at 14, she became a geisha, contracted syphilis and declined to the rank of prostitute. At 31, she was hired as a servant in an inn. Kichizo Ishida, a libertine married to the owner, quickly noticed the young woman. They fell madly in love, married clandestinely and, in a tea house, spent four days making love without interruption under the astonished gaze of the servants and geishas passing by.
Between them, no practice is forbidden: introducing food into the vagina, cunnilingus during menstruation, erotic strangulation… Sexual possession intensifies inexorably: on May 16, 1936, Kichi agrees to be strangled by Sada until he dies. She complies, cutting off his penis before writing on his chest in letters of blood: “Sada and Kichi together forever”At her trial, her testimony moved public opinion. Her act was classified as a crime of passion: she would spend six years in prison before being pardoned in 1941.
“A bullfight of love”
In 1970, after a wind of revolutionary utopias, Japan began its long sleep of prosperity. It was at this time that Nagisa Oshima (1932-2013) decided to seize the Abe Sada myth. The troublemaker of the Japanese new wave considers that, “in this world, making a film is, originally, a criminal act” and does not want to be confined to the genre of the “porn novel” then in vogue, films with more or less erotic content, but which are made in compliance with censorship: prohibition of showing body hair or genitals.
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