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BFI Film Classics: In The Realm of the Senses by Joan Mellen

This is not the most convincing entry in this terrific series. Mellen seems to have decided that since the film is a masterpiece, which I wouldn't necessarily argue with, everything about it is praiseworthy, and since Oshima was a left-wing radical, everything about this must be progressive. I am particularly unpersuaded by her attempts to cast rape as a liberating, positive event for women - she even calls it feminist - but she also reaches a long way to portray this film as political in quite specific ways. There are a few seconds that can be read as anti-militaristic, arguably, but she stretches this much too far. Also, she ignores the history of the depiction of sexually voracious women in Japan, where they are demonic figures - the female lead here fits more easily into that tradition rather than any feminist reading. Nonetheless, her understanding of the sexual content, its allegorical and political significances, is excellent, and expressed superbly - even if her own dry descriptions of the explicit imagery seem to deny her support for its own ideas, of sex as something entirely positive and without shame.

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