A gravitational black hole of desire, sucking into its core light, space, time, and, finally, History itself. This is "In the Realm of the Senses" (Ai no Corrida) by Nagisa Ōshima. To watch this film in the twenty-first century, in an age of on-demand pornography and digital desensitization, requires an almost archaeological effort of contextualization. We must strip ourselves of our own superstructures to confront a cinematic object conceived not to entertain, nor to excite in the vulgar sense of the term, but to perform a ritual autopsy on obsession, leading the spectator to the edge of an abyss where pleasure and death merge into a single, terrifying liturgy.

The year is 1936, in Tokyo. Outside the inn where the former geisha Sada Abe and her employer and lover Kichizo Ishida seclude themselves, Japan is on the march. The uniforms, the measured footsteps, the flags of the Rising Sun: these are the harbingers of catastrophe, the sound of a nation about to immolate its own individuality on the altar of militaristic collectivism and imperial expansion. Ōshima shows us this in fleeting glimpses, like a background noise that grows ever more insistent and, at the same time, irrelevant. Inside that room, sealed like a hyperbaric chamber of the soul, Sada and Kichi commit an act of rebellion as radical as it is apolitical: they deny the outside world. They reject History, nation, family, economy, even the cycle of day and night, to consecrate themselves to a single, all-consuming imperative: the desire for the other. Theirs is a secession from the human community, a desertion from the social body to found a nation of two whose only territory is the flesh.

More than the Marquis de Sade, to whom a superficial analysis might hastily compare him, the work’s guiding spirit is Georges Bataille. "In the Realm of the Senses" is the purest and most intransigent cinematic transposition of the Bataillean concept of érotisme: that search for the continuity of being through transgression, a limit-experience that tears through the discontinuity of our individual existence to tap into a state of primordial fusion, indistinguishable from death. It is no accident that the sex in Ōshima's film progressively loses all connotation of joy or vitality to become an exhausting rite, a form of absolute and unproductive expenditure (Bataille’s dépense), aimed solely at reaching the breaking point. Their spiral of pleasure, erotic strangulations, and growing isolation is not a celebration of life, but a meticulous preparation for its dissolution.

Ōshima does not merely recount a transgression; he commits it. The scandalous and courageous decision to use unsimulated sex is not a prurient device, but an ontological choice. The wall of representation collapses: the filmed act and the real act coincide, creating a short-circuit that forces the spectator to confront not a fiction, but an event. The actor no longer interprets desire, they are desire. This radicalism cost the film censorship in its homeland (and in much of the world) and forced Ōshima into a clever production stratagem: the film was registered as a French co-production, the negatives were smuggled to Paris to be developed and edited, thus bypassing Japan's draconian pornography laws. An anecdote that becomes a metaphor: to create this borderless space of eros, the director had to physically cross national borders, himself committing an act of expatriation and transgression.

The direction has a glacial, almost entomological precision. The camera observes the bodies of Eiko Matsuda and Tatsuya Fuji not with lust, but with the curiosity of a scientist studying two particles in a cloud chamber, destined for an annihilating collision. The composition of the frame, dense with warm colors (the red of blood, of kimonos, of blankets) and enclosed in ever more constricting spaces—the inn, the room, the bed—evokes the Japanese pictorial tradition of ukiyo-e, and particularly the erotic shunga prints. As in those works, the bodies are not idealized but shown in their raw, at times clumsy, materiality. There is none of the anatomical perfection of Western porn, but the truth of two bodies that eat, sleep, sweat, and love each other to the point of exhaustion. The scenic space progressively contracts, becoming a physical extension of their mental universe, a cocoon that both protects and suffocates them.

In this descent into the inferno of passion, the film establishes a disturbing parallel with another form of obsession that was rampant in 1936 Japan: the cult of the emperor and of death for the fatherland. Both are forms of the annihilation of the self in a larger entity: for the soldiers, the Nation; for Sada and Kichi, the couple. Both are death drives masked as absolute ideals. In this sense, Sada's private obsession becomes the anarchic and nihilistic counterpoint to the public, nationalist obsession. If Japanese fascism asked its citizens to die for the Empire, Sada and Kichi build their own private empire in order to die. It is a devastating short-circuit, an act of existential terrorism against the dominant ideology.

The final castration, the climax of the real story of Abe Sada that shocked Japan, transcends in Ōshima's film the mere act of a lurid crime report. It is not a horror-film twist, but a liturgical act, the bloody signature on a pact of absolute love. It is Sada's desperate and insane attempt to possess Kichi forever, to snatch him from time, from decay, and from the outside world, transforming a part of his body into a relic, an eternal fetish. It is the logical conclusion of a love that could no longer tolerate any separation, any residual individuality. As in certain works of Yukio Mishima, supreme beauty can only be attained in the instant of its own destruction. Sada's act is the creation of a terrible and definitive work of art, sculpted in the flesh of her lover.

One might be tempted to draw a parallel with the surrealism of Buñuel’s L'Âge d'Or, where amour fou manifests as a subversive force against bourgeois and religious institutions. But Ōshima's revolt is more intimate, more silent, and, perhaps, more desperate. There is no "outside" to scandalize or a system to tear down; the external world has already vanished. The only reality is the room, the only language is the body, the only possible end is the consummation of desire in death. This is not a film to be "loved" in the conventional sense, but a work to be overwhelmed by, perhaps even repulsed by, yet whose aesthetic and philosophical coherence is unassailable. "In the Realm of the Senses" remains an extreme cinematic experience, a black monolith planted in the history of cinema that questions us on the nature of desire, the limits of individual freedom, and the vertigo of the void. A monument to the ultimate frontier where Eros and Thanatos cease to be opposites and become the same, terrifying divinity.