Critics reviews

Erotic cinema at its most corporeal. In setting out to create a work of true pornography, Oshima doesn’t present a single image that feels excessive or unnecessary.

If Abe and her lover were applauded for their doomed pursuit of individualism at the height of Japan’s nationalistic fervor, Matsuda’s own anti-establishment political statement brought an end to her young career. It is a risk that Matsuda must have considered when she committed to the project, and it is a testament to her powers as an actor that none of this fear for what may come leeches into her performance.

Too much intimacy elicits more discomfort than pleasure, and as Oshima's work engages with unsimulated acts, he intimately challenges the label of pornography. In presenting real sex, Oshima transgresses on the forbidden nature of sexuality as a private and personal experience. In the Realm of the Senses acts consciously to break down taboos to liberate the audience from their own obsessions.

The film is eerily quiet and controlled, suggesting a military procession rather than pornography. (Catherine Breillat, who cites it as her favorite film, has written, "It made me understand that an image is not pornographic in itself, it's the way we look at it that renders it pornographic.") Theatrical presentation only heightens this association—it's a movie that needs to be seen with an audience.

The masterly way in which [Oshima] accomplishes this constitutes a lesson in cinematic means to psychological ends, and can be applied to many examples other than the pornographic... In the Realm of the Senses certainly satisfies none of these porno requirements. Rather, it actively challenges such assumptions. It is truly subversive: it questions current mores, political as well as sexual, and in so doing, it offers the interested viewer a lesson in the psychological dynamics of film technique.

Its sexuality is as carefully considered and methodical as Oshima's rigid, symmetrical shots and blooming, balanced colors. Even though the thin plot is oversold in the first sentence of this review (know that the man and woman are called Kichizo and Sada and you're good to go), the film charges so brazenly into test cases for audience tolerance that it very literally becomes an entirely different movie for each viewer.

No film plays as brutally with dramatic (filmic--if I didn't hate that word) distance and intimacy. This isn't a playful strip tease or an exercise in Marquis de Sade deviance. Oshima stops time or at the very least jolts us out of our vulgar understanding of time and being, allowing us to recognize and reconsider ourselves in the light of a profoundly destructive and immeasurable love.

What could be more appropriate for a journal called ‘Senses of Cinema' than a film entitled ‘In the Realm of the Senses'? In both cases the title plays on the double meaning of the word senses... Oshima's essay in pornography, In the Realm of the Senses, presents the full gamut of sensory experience – adding taste, touch and smell to sight and sound – and provokes a plethora of interpretations.

[In the Realm of the Senses] is one of the most powerful erotic films ever made, but it certainly isn't for every taste... This 1976 feature is unusually straightforward for Oshima, and those who are put off are likely to be disturbed more by the content than by the style. But the film is unforgettable for its ritualistic (if fatalistic) fascination with sex as a total commitment.

However provocative [its political] undercurrents may be—and it is clearly not accidental that Oshima should have made an ostensibly apolitical film at a time when Japanese political activists have lapsed into almost complete passivity—the film's primary force remains its exceptionally bold analysis of the implications of true sexual passion.