EMPIRE OF PASSION (Ai no borei)
Japan/France. 1978. Director/Screenplay - Nagisa Oshima, Based on the Novel `Three Generations to Make the Land Fertile: The Earth' by Itoko Namura, Photography - Yoshio Miyajima, Music - Toru Takemitsu. Production Company - Argos Films/Oshima Productions. Kazuko Yoshiyuki (Seki), Tatsuya Fuji (Toyoji), Takahiro Tamura (Gisaburo Desa), Takuzo Kawatani (Inspector Hotta)
Plot: In a small Japanese village in 1895, a wife Seki has an affair with a younger man Toyoji. On the spur of the moment Toyoji shaves her pubic hair and decides they must kill her husband Gisaburo so that he doesn't find her shaven. Seki gets Gisaburo drunk, they kill him and then dump his body down a well and pretend that he has gone away to find work. But three years later Gisaburo returns as a ghost, confused and lost. The guilt of his return drives Seki and Toyoji to desperation.
This venture into the kaidan eiga (or Japanese ghost story) was highly acclaimed on its release in 1978 but was little seen out of limited arthouse release and has been entirely forgotten since. The director Nagisa Oshima is highly respected in Japanese cinema, having made some forty films, of which the best known in the West is probably `Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence' (1983).
Far more so than Western ghost stories ever do, most kaidan eiga centre around themes of guilt and retribution. Oshima's twist on the ghost story here is that his ghost isn't so much an avenging spirit as it is a sad and confused lost soul whose vague stumblings around drive his murderers to guilt and anguish. Oshima's presages the ghost's appearances with a genuine eeriness - three years after the body has been dumped down the well, a friend dreaming of Gisaburo telling her to bring him some clean clothes, he is tired of sleeping in the same ones; or his daughter dreaming of him telling her he will be home by New Year. Locating of the story in a 19th Century rural peasant setting, Oshima employs the style of Japanese post-War neo-realist cinema to considerable effect. At times the camera little more than sits impassively observing scenes of extraordinarily raw effect transpiring before it. Throughout the love scenes and the shaving scene Oshima keeps focused on Yoshiyuki's face, watching not the passion or the act but the pain on her face and the effect has cuttingly real emotional power. The actual murder plot occurs with astonishing casualness - Fuji shaves Yoshiyuki's pubic hair and then suddenly announces "We must kill him. How can we let him see you shaved ?"
Copyright 1998 Richard Scheib
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