Assessing a movie like In The Realm Of The Senses is tricky, because the subject matter — and the unstinting presentation of same — makes it difficult to render an opinion that doesn’t seem like it’s actually about the reviewer’s own attitudes towards sex, or, more to the point, towards sexual situations on film.

For those of you not familiar with the film’s plot, James Berardinelli’s review can outline it for you — not that it consists of much more than a sentence. Berardinelli also sums up what he sees as the received wisdom about In The Realm Of The Senses:

There are two points-of-view regarding this film. The first is that In the Realm of the Senses is a deeply-disturbing examination of sexual obsession that requires its lurid candidness to fully explore the subject. The second is that the movie is a thinly-veiled attempt to dress up pornography in the guise of an art film. Which interpretation an individual viewer is likely to take depends as much on who they are as on what they see in the movie. It’s safe to say that anyone offended by graphic sexual displays will not be impressed by In the Realm of the Senses.

Berardinelli is close, but not quite there. It’s meant as a deeply disturbing examination of sexual obsession, no doubt, but although it did not succeed for me (more on that in a moment), I don’t therefore believe that it’s an attempt to dress up porn in the guise of an art film — at least, not on the part of the director. I do suspect that some people who claim to find the film “effective” or “devastating” do so because it is more convenient intellectually to classify their response to the graphic sexual content as seated in the power of the film’s message…when it is quite possibly the case that the repeated, sugar-free images of fornication caused a more baseline arousal. That kind of reaction does not make In The Realm Of The Senses pornography; nor does shrouding said reaction in pretention make In The Realm Of The Senses art of any real significance.

I shouldn’t generalize, I guess, but speaking only for myself, I was “not impressed by In The Realm Of The Senses,” and I am not typically offended by graphic sexual displays. I would like them to serve the storytelling, and I do get frustrated at times — most often in prose, versus film — with sex scenes that seem gratuitous, in the sense that the author/filmmaker wanted to show s/he “could” execute one (in other words, serving the storytell-er). Fucking per se does not put me off, but like I said up top, the decision to include it, or to center the story around it, does pull focus almost entirely from a movie’s other qualities.

The other qualities manifestly failed to amaze and delight. Obsessive love/sexual desire is not terribly interesting in the end to anyone except those participating; the fallout from it or the consequences it creates may create relevance, but to watch the dyad itself is, after the first dozen explicit couplings, really rather tiresome, because you may not share the couple’s sexual tastes or find either of them attractive, much less worthy of twee, phallocentric monomania. And because the obsession by definition does not include you, is not universal to you, you wonder why it is you should care. Specific to In The Realm Of The Senses, Sada is an attractive woman, but her childish jealousy and mewly line readings (not to mention the baby-voiced grunt/coo noise she makes over and over during sex — like she’s getting poked with a sharp stick, and not anywhere pleasurable) get old quickly. After a while, you hope she’ll make good on her frequent, and lengthily delivered, threats to kill Kichizo, if only so the story comes to an end with due speed.

A segue into a discussion of the ending here is probably a spoiler, but…so it goes. The audience is meant to find the end shocking, but instead, we come across the other problem with focusing on a story of sexual obsession without much context: we have no sense of who these people are, other than that they like having sex with each other to a compulsive degree. The finale is not surprising — they’re completely consumed by one another sexually, and in the end, they’re consumed, period — but that point is made after 15 minutes, and while the inexorable pacing could have been useful, the sex scenes aren’t leavened by anything else, any other activity or characterization; it isn’t pacing so much as drumming it into us (and in a film about sex, you’d think the director could mimic the pacing of intercourse successfully, bringing us to a satisfying finish…there’s a reason it’s called a climax).

Other characters make repeated reference to the fact that Sada and Kichizo literally do nothing but fuck; they don’t eat, their room is funky, all they do is drink sake and moon at each other and whimper orgasmically. But after four scenes in the first hour devoted to the subject of their tirelessness, their limitless appetites for the body of the other…you know, I get it. I have had torrid affairs; I have had more garden-variety relationships during which, at the beginning, Doing It is your primary activity when you’re together and your primary preoccupation when you’re not. Many of us have. Most of us did not assume that anyone else cared to know the details.

The gory, psychotic denouement is, in our post-Bobbitt world, almost too absurd to shock at this point in cultural history. We know these things happen; the filing of tax returns happens, too, and would be roughly as entertaining were it shown for 104 minutes in all its many positions. The printing of spreadsheets! The crunching of numbers! The hunt for receipts! If you don’t enjoy it, you’re uptight about math! …I’m all for realism, and I’m all for art forcing us to confront and reevaluate our cultural standards; I would prefer that it not feel like quite such a chore.

Rob Gonsalves puts it rather neatly, I think, although he’s more generous than I am: “[T]he film isn’t bad by any means — never a dull moment, as they say — but neither is it the great radical work you may expect after all those years of awed reviews.” The movie wound up on my Netflix list because an acquaintance had recommended it to me, almost challenging me to confront the shocking content. It sat on my list for over a year because of the Very Long Wait; someone always had it out, I guess. And it was challenging, all right — because of the myriad “dull moments” of which it’s made.

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