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Byron's impossible life of passion ("a continuous earthquake, an eternal fever") in Nagisa Oshima's great scandale, a serene sendup of a French erotic picture about Japan. Servant and former prostitute (Eiko Matsuda), "acutely sensitive," master of the house and "certainly a virile gentleman" (Tatsuya Fuji), he lifts her kimono while she cleans the floor and off they go in search of the endless orgasm. Sex while lying, standing, eating, singing, in private and in public, a carnal utopia in a Tokyo inn that grows grimy and pungent. She so refuses to let go of his manhood that it ends up in her hand, severed though still erect. "Are you ever not wet?" While Imamura sees it as the prime animal impulse weaving humanity together, sex to Oshima is always a conscious political act—far from a liberation manifesto, the couple's decision to drop out, tune off and fuck into oblivion evokes disillusionment, a private revolution that burns itself out. Outside, the Rising Sun Flag poking at the flaccid old vagrant in the snow, then waving at imperial troops marching one way while the male protagonist goes the other. Inside, a thorough study of Hokusai's Exhausted Lovers, an acceleration toward danger (the bullfighting of the original title is never far off) recorded with a calm classical eye. Egg in the slit and hair in the mouth, a reversal of power and a desperate fusion of bodies. "Perverts" to those around them, from their own viewpoint the last romantics, a yellow parasol in the void under a downpour. Carving knife and silken cord, anything to get a rise out of a spent fellow: "I guess you have to approach death to feel the height of ecstasy." The elderly geisha who gets her turn, a Mishima flash ("All I see is red"), Sada the heroine bloodied and happy. Society's voice surveys the aftermath, disapprovingly but not without a hint of awe. Cinematography by Hideo Ito.
--- Fernando F. Croce |