Censors working overtime: in the realm of the senses

Sex ruins everything in the movies of Nagisa Oshima. No, it’s not a matter of friendships being trashed, feelings being hurt or voicemail messages being ignored. For Oshima, sex is more about the unleashing of primal energies that threaten to undermine societal controls. Again and again in his films — the most notorious being 1976’s In the Realm of the Senses, a ferocious collision of art and pornography that was long-banned in Ontario and many parts elsewhere — the body politic is ruptured by bodily lusts, the systems designed to contain and repress our more animal instincts being continually destroyed by our propensity for shagging ourselves silly and breaking all the furniture.

That said, Cinematheque Ontario patrons will, we hope, behave themselves during the fall season’s big event, the first major Nagisa Oshima retrospective in North America in two decades. A near-complete survey of the director’s work from 1960 to 2000, “In the Realm of Oshima” is the culmination of 10 years of hard work by programmer James Quandt. Many freshly struck prints of long-unseen works will be screened over the next two months before the retro continues its tour of the continent.

The opening salvo of the Japanese New Wave and a film whose impact in its homeland is often likened to that of Breathless in the West, his 1960 feature Cruel Story of Youth (****; Oct. 31, 7pm) launches the series on an appropriately bold and lusty note. Though this lurid juvie-delinquent movie about a pair of doomed Tokyo teens is full of American signifiers (e.g., rockabilly tunes, switchblades, a colour palette that Nicholas Ray would’ve killed for), its socio-political content and sexual frankness make it something far more than another of the Rebel Without a Cause rehashes then saturating the global movie market. The stylistic audacity of many scenes — like the lengthy take in which our hero munches an apple while watching over his girlfriend in a seedy abortion clinic, or the shockingly grisly conclusion — established Oshima’s flair for busting cinematic norms with as much rude energy as possible.

That film also introduces the director’s interest in the oscillation between idealism and nihilism experienced by young people in Japan’s postwar generations. He would repeatedly reveal how people’s reactions to social pressures can take the form of transgressive or destructive sexual behaviour. In 1966’s Violence at Noon (****; Nov. 23, 2:30pm), the fates of members of a failed farm collective are intertwined after the leader commits suicide and another member begins a spree of rapes and murders. As the police hunt for the killer, his estranged wife and his former lover contend with the closely shared feelings of guilt, loyalty, love and fear inspired by their monstrous beau.

Four years later, Oshima traded in Violence at Noon’s crime-flick trappings for Antonioni-like narrative obfuscations in The Man Who Left His Will on Film (****; Nov. 10, 7pm), the story of a student filmmaker who grows obsessed with the last footage shot by a colleague before his suicide. One of the era’s most pointed enquiries into filmmaking’s spurious value as a political action, it’s also given great urgency by its highly stylized and graphic-for-the-era sex scenes.

Nevertheless, little would prepare audiences for the provocations that awaited them in two of Oshima’s ’70s masterpieces. The saga of a powerful clan whose advancing state of moral decay is depicted via a series of birthdays, funerals and one highly Buñuelian wedding that is performed despite the absence of the bride, The Ceremony (*****; Nov. 17, 7pm) is a formally exquisite and scabrously satirical condemnation of Japanese society.

But even such sights as a possibly incestuous liaison between the film’s lead characters inside a coffin couldn’t compare with the scenes of hardcore fornication in the movie that would gain him the most infamy: based on the true story of a torrid affair between a maid and her employer on the eve of World War II, In the Realm of the Senses (*****; Nov. 14, 8:30pm and Nov. 15, 9pm) is one of cinema’s steamiest cage matches between Eros and Thanatos. It still makes this decade’s batch of art-house skin flicks (e.g., 9 Songs, Shortbus) seem hopelessly timid.

Early reports that Oshima’s first effort after a 14-year hiatus — it was his first feature since he suffered a debilitating stroke in the ’90s and is likely his last given the now-76-year-old director’s poor health — had to do with gay samurais raised expectations that he would offer a queer variation on his earlier fuckfests. Instead, 2000’s Gohatto (****; Dec. 6, 7pm) is more demure than some viewers might’ve hoped, but quite sly in the ways Oshima depicts lust’s disruptive effects on a rigidly ordered society.

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