In the Realm of the Senses is considered the Japanese director and scriptwriter Nagisa Oshima’s masterpiece, so it definitely deserves a little of our attention here, in this blog section.
The film was released in 1976, becoming a scandalous release since included a few scenes of explicit sex and sadomasochism, quite strong for those times.
This is why Oshima had to finish the film in France, as they were much more permissive there than in Japan, where it is still censored nowadays.
Even these days, we can detect some censorship in the cover of the Blu-Ray edition when compared to the real image of the movie.
If we turn our sight back to that same date in our country, we would realize that only a few years before, the censors controlled our very own screens; skirts that didn’t show women’s knees, kisses between lovers who felt like sinners, and not even tongue kisses!!
And let’s not talk about how many films had a big part of their footage discarded in order to make them “appropriate” for the public. I can’t imagine the shock of our parents when they watched some of the scenes shown in this movie.
To make matters worse, L’émpire Des Sens is based on actual events, so the controversy is served.
