It’s funny that the general introductions I had to this movie were how shocking it was in its hardcore pornography.. No one ever told me that it was a hardcore passionate story. In the Realm of the Senses is one of the most saddest movies I’ve ever seen just from the way it shows the extreme isolated world of Sada and Kichi. I feel tremendous senses of transcendence mixed with sadness when I see the way the film shows their intensely involved realm in such a hermetic and lonesome manner. This is contrasted by colder scenes with outsiders to their niche… people in their society… a wife.. servants… clients … soldiers….. essentially everything that houses them.
It is like witnessing a saturated and overwhelming world in a wound.

It’s truly a miracle that Oshima was able to make it. The shifts of dynamics involving the scale of people and environments is very impressive to me. The sets by Toda Jusho are so beautiful and subtle… always confining yet strangely labyrinthine. I felt so devastated by the climactic scene where Kichi and Sada go to the highest limit. Gorgeous lighting work by Okamoto Kenichi who also did the lighting for Mizoguchi Kenji’s Ugetsu.

As a note, the Japanese title “Ai no Corrida” translates literally from Japanese and Spanish to “Bullfight of Love” .. interesting title.

Somehow the Western title really is in a more simple way fitting too in how visceral and textural the film is. You can almost taste, touch and smell everything. Amorous.

Did I mention that it’s rare in movies and stories to see such pure self-giving from the male to female in the context of sex? Unhealthy yet heroic.