Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
A passionate telling of the story of Sada Abe, a woman whose affair with her master led to an obsessive and ultimately destructive sexual relationship.
Oshima's transgressive masterpiece is one of cinema's most audacious works — a film that dissolves the boundary between art and pornography to explore obsession, freedom, and death-drive with genuine artistic intent. The acting, particularly Eiko Matsuda and Tatsuya Fuji, conveys escalating erotic fixation with raw, unguarded commitment rarely seen on screen. Cinematography by Hideo Ito is lush and claustrophobic, using interior spaces and warm tones to render a world that contracts around the lovers. Its novelty remains almost unmatched — no major art film before or since has attempted this particular fusion of unsimulated sexuality and genuine dramatic gravitas within a literary framework. The ending, though historically grounded and thematically coherent, arrives with a certain inevitability that slightly diminishes its dramatic impact despite its visceral shock.