Full frontal classic?

Nagisa Oshima’s “Ai No Corrida” (“(In) The Realm of the Senses”) is a joyless, soulless and worst of all pointless film. Released in 1976, the film caused major controversy due to its graphic (even by today’s standards) depiction of sexual obsession. The narrative revolves around a prostitute who falls in lust with the brothel owner’s husband, and the two strike up quite the affair. To be sure, there’s barely a scene where the two of them aren’t indulging in some sexual pleasure (a relative term) or another. We learn that the events are set in 1936, but only at the film’s end, courtesy of an abrupt voice over. There’s a shot of the male character walking down the road as troops march past, but that’s it – he is no more oblivious to their presence than the film itself.

The film inspires a revisit of that classic debate, “is it erotica or porn”? Erotica is as subjective an experience as humour, and that usually ends the debate for me. However, I find it hard to believe that anyone could really make an argument for the film as a work of erotica. It’s not porn, I think; Oshima’s camera is too detached, too unconcerned with angles, to be seen as arousing in the way porn is supposed to be arousing. Yet this doesn’t mean that the film is erotic; it is far too cold and dead to be that. I’m not even sure if the film explores sexual obsession, as has been claimed. “Last Tango in Paris” did that, and successfully so (also in the ‘70s – what an era!) but “Ai No Corrida” seems more like an uninvolved, mechanistic recording of sexual acts that become increasingly dangerous/perverted/sublime (take your pick).

In the end, Oshima’s film amounts to little more than a historical curio for the cineaste to see what exactly had sent censors into a spin more than three decades ago. Once I’d seen it, I knew (it was probably the insertion of the egg into the vagina that clinched it), and was otherwise none the richer for it. Rape, mutilation, asphyxiation – is it supposed to be a social commentary? Yes? On what? Oshima’s so concerned with shots of erect penises (penii?) that by the time the film’s done, he’s all spent, with nothing else to show.

“Ai No Corrida”. Enter at own risk.