Movies I’m Watching: Nagisa Oshima’s Pleasures of the Flesh (Etsuraku)

I haven’t watched too many Oshima films but judging from Etsuraku (I really dig his style, especially the cinematography. There’s just something about the film stock that they used over there in the 1960s – plus Oshima loves nothing more than a dark and moody palette where faces and body parts are outlined in a distant light, as if they were fighting, struggling to emerge out of the darkness that envelops the rest of the frame.

There is also some fairly “radical” techniques, such as a method of framing certian shots such as they decenter the subject though those are actually a small minority of the shots. What I really loved were the montages: one of them was a girl smiling behind a glass (windshield…) you can see the skin on her hands. This one is not really a montage or double exposure type of thing, it’s more just a clever and poetic shot, photographic virtuosity if you will. The other one is more of a double/triple exposure type shot, where you have a close-ups of a woman’s face overlapping with each other, melding and shifting into and out of each other like a strange lipsticked hydra of desire.

It’s these kinds of sensibilities, plus the whole 1960s Japanese style of clothing (those suits with skinny ties are BOSS) that makes me love this film. The story is a bit meh … well, it’s not the tabla that counts, it’s how the story is rendered onto film. The acting is a bit garish in places, and I don’t if that’s a result of the style of the film or whether or not those were just the general acting conventions in the Japan of the time.

As for other films that Oshima has made: glancing through his IMDB the only one that I have seen for sure is the sensationally infamous In the Realm of the Senses, which is NC-17 up the wazoo, with real penetration, fellatio, etc. Another movie of his that I have not seen but which seems really intriguing is Mao Tse-Tung and the Cultural Revolution, which appears to be some 50 minute TV…documentary? Who knows. Would be awesome to get my hands on that…but I doubt it’s on DVD in China (my DVD dealer would have told me right quick if it was).