Fifty years after the Cannes scandal, Nagisa Ōshima's Empire of the Senses returns to Italian cinemas from November 9th, for the first time in full version, restored in 4K and distributed by CG Entertainment with Cat People. The true story of Sada Abe and Kichizo Ishida, Tokyo 1936, becomes a melodrama in which pleasure and death are confused. Between censorship, trials, a changed title, censorship scissors and Bataille's shadow, this is why this love bullfight remains the most daring film in Japanese cinema
«Brothers, at the same time, Love and Death / generated fate». Giacomo Leopardi wrote it in 1832, and could not have known that just over a century later, in Tokyo, a woman named Sada Abe would take that verse literally, with a cord of cloth and a knife. Nor could he have imagined that, in 1976, a director son of a samurai family would transform that crime story into one of the most scandalous, censored and (for those who had the patience to look beyond the surface of the bodies) moving films in the history of cinema.
That film is called Ai no korīda, literally "bullfight of love", and in Italy we have known it as Ecco l'Impero dei sensori. From November 9th it returns to Italian cinemas with the title The Empire of the Senses, and above all for the first time in the full version, restored in 4K on the initiative of Argos Films with the support of the French CNC and distributed by CG Entertainment in collaboration with Cat People. Forbidden to minors under 18, of course: some things, fifty years later, have not changed.
The True Story of Sada Abe: Tokyo, May 1936
Japan in 1936 is a country preparing for war. Soldiers marching through the streets heading to Manchuria, in February a group of young officers attempted a coup d'état, the air is full of militarism and obedience. In an inn in Nakano, Sada, a former geisha turned waitress, and Kichizo Ishida, the owner of the place, begin a relationship that in a few weeks devours everything else: his wife, work, money, time itself. They lock themselves in the rooms of a meeting house and almost never come out.
On May 18, Sada strangled her lover in his sleep, then cut off his genitals and took them away, wrapped in paper, for a few days on the run around the city, until the police arrested her. The trial becomes a national case, public opinion largely supports her, the sentence is lenient: six years. Released from prison in 1941, Sada Abe returned to the spotlight after the war, with an autobiography and some appearances in the world of entertainment, before disappearing into thin air. Black legend and pop together, so much so that a year before Ōshima it was Noboru Tanaka who brought her to the screen with Abesada – The abyss of the senses (1975), within the Nikkatsu porn romance genre.
A film shot in Kyoto and developed in Paris
But Ōshima wanted more. He wanted to show everything, without the cinematic fiction of simulated sex, and in Japan this was simply impossible. The solution came from Paris, from the producer Anatole Dauman and his Argos Films (the same one that had produced Resnais, Marker, Godard): the film became a co-production with a French majority and the exposed film was sent to France to be developed, thus circumventing the obscenity laws that prohibited it from being made at home. A Japanese film, therefore, that the Japanese would never have been able to see in full (and still today, in Japan, it circulates with blurring of the genitals).
In May 1976, The Empire of the Senses opened the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. The success, or perhaps the curiosity, is such that the expected projections go from five to twelve. At home, meanwhile, Ōshima ended up on trial for obscenity, not for the film but for the book which collected the script and still photographs: he was acquitted in 1979, with a sentence confirmed on appeal in 1982. Two years later in Cannes, with Empire of Passion, that same Croisette awarded him the prize for best director
Bataille, Bertolucci, Ferreri: the company left outside the door
«It can be said of eroticism that it is the approval of life right up to death». The sentence that opens The Eroticism of Georges Bataille could be in the exergy of the film, and it is no coincidence that, at the time of the scandal, Ōshima's name was often compared to that of the French thinker. The French, moreover, call orgasm la petite mort, the little death; Ōshima simply removes the adjective. While it lends itself to this reading, Ōshima's film remains a profoundly Japanese film: environments that look like stages, sliding doors, traditional songs, the pasty red of the kimonos and lanterns, an almost feudal Japan, if it weren't for the trains, cigarettes and marching soldiers.
Here is the true political intuition of a film accused, then, of disengagement. Ōshima talks about society leaving it outside the door. Sada and Kichizo are voluntary exiles, like the protagonists of Last Tango in Paris by Bernardo Bertolucci or the four pleasure seekers who lock themselves in the villa to eat until they die in Marco Ferreri's The Great Binge. More than a last tango in Paris, a last tango in Nakano. While outside Japan is regimented, they choose the most radical disobedience of all: to serve no purpose except the pleasure of others. There is a sequence that says it better than any essay: Kichizo walks in the opposite direction to a column of soldiers cheered by the crowd, the only one who goes the other way, towards the room, towards Sada, towards the end.
Sada, desire in the first person
You, Sada, have never asked anyone's permission. You came from the world of geisha, where pleasure is also an art of representation, and at a certain point you decided not to act anymore. You loved a man until you took him away from the world, and the world, instead of casting the first stone, lined up to see you in court. In your name there is even an echo of the Divine Marquis (Sada, Sade: a vowel is enough), but yours was not cruelty, it was the inability to please yourself. Other than Nine and a Half Weeks: a few weeks were enough for you, and no blindfold, to go where cinema had never gone. For you, "until death do you part" is not a formula, but a program.
The film is told above all from her point of view, and this is the reason why, half a century later, Empire of the Senses has not aged like many "scandalous" films of its era. Eiko Matsuda creates a Sada who is both a child and a predator, jealous to the point of madness, hungry, very tender; Tatsuya Fuji offers her a compliant Kichizo, almost happy to surrender. He is the bull, she is the bullfighter, and in the bullfight evoked by the original title there is no doubt who leaves the arena alive.
However, the actress also paid a price: in her homeland, Eiko Matsuda's career never really recovered from the scandal. Ironically, the Ōshima bullfight had a happier life elsewhere: in 1980 Chaz Jankel titled Ai no corrida a funk song written with Kenny Young, which the following year, in Quincy Jones' version, would become an international disco hit. The fate of certain titles.
Here is the empire of the senses: the title, the scissors and the Italian censorship
In Italy the road was long. Presented to the censors in 1977, the film was also rejected on appeal. A new edition, entitled Ecco l'Impero dei Sensi, obtained approval in 1978, after further cuts and with a ban on children under 18. It wasn't enough to add an adverb: the scissors had also worked on the images. To see the film in its original form, Italian audiences would have had to wait for home video in the 1990s; in the room, uncut, it had never arrived. Until today.
As for the Western title, L'Empire des sens, it was chosen by the French production instead of the more murky and romantic Ai no korīda. Nomen omen, in both cases, but on two different axes: the empire evokes power, domination, politics; the bullfight instead promises a deadly clash, a show in which the only winner will be death. The 2026 re-release holds the two souls together, The Empire of the Senses (Ai no korīda), and finally returns the film in its entirety, without cuts.
The empire of the senses at the cinema from November 9th: why see it today
It might be said that today, in the era in which any "forbidden" image is within reach of a smartphone in a few seconds, Ōshima's provocation has lost its venom. The opposite is true. Precisely because the explicit no longer shocks, what remains on the screen is the rest: the pictorial composition of each shot, Hideo Itō's photography, Minoru Miki's music, the way in which an absolute love becomes prison and liberation at the same time, joy and annihilation, sweetness and brutality. A regressive melodrama, rather than an erotic film; a work about freedom which, taken to its end, coincides with its own end.
Nagisa Ōshima died in January 2013, at the age of eighty. His most famous film has fifty and doesn't show it, since certain obsessions know no better restoration than the darkness of a theater. Sada Abe, who carried her love with her for days in a handbag, had understood what Leopardi had put into verse a century earlier: that Love and Death are brothers, and that sometimes, under the same roof, they live in a single room.
