You have to tell the truth about your country, whatever it is.” To that point, “In the Realm of the Senses” might be the most patriotic film the lifelong firebrand ever made.

“Just puffing out your chest with national pride and telling people how wonderful your country is does not constitute love of country as I see it. “Love of a country is a strange thing,” Ōshima once said. It’s never been easier to appreciate Ōshima’s pity for these characters, or how their carnal revolt against the rising tide of militarism - no matter how revolting it gets - is able to convey the dangers of living in a country that’s ashamed of all the wrong things.

While “In the Realm of the Senses” hasn’t aged a day since its riotous initial release almost 50 years ago, the most notorious and universal of Ōshima’s films hits that much harder at a time when staying inside has become a meaningful way of saving the United States from itself. the WorldĮmmy Predictions: Best Actress in a Limited Series - More Than a Two-Horse Race Stream of the Day: Steven Soderbergh's 'Raiders' Sees Indiana Jones in a New LightĮmmy Predictions: Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series - 'Ted Lasso' vs. Stream of the Day: Alfonso Cuarón's 'A Little Princess' Is the Best Cinematic Version of Burnett's Fairy Tale World No matter how you slice it, “In the Realm of the Senses” is perhaps the most pungent movie ever made. This is, after all, a claustrophobic (and broadly true) saga of erotic obsession from the most hostile of Japanese auteurs a mad and scandalous work of art that’s full of unsimulated sex, peppered with a massacre’s worth of little deaths, and topped off with a scene of genital amputation so unflinching that it feels like an answer to the eyeball cut in Buñuel’s “Un Chien Andalou.” Even if you’re willing to consider that Abe Sada chops off Ishida Kichizō’s penis as an act of love and mutual liberation, it still hurts to watch.

Even now, when American viewers coming to the film for the first time might be inclined to sympathize with a story about two people who self-quarantine to save themselves from their country’s suicidal ideology, it can be easy to miss the forest for the trees and mistake Ōshima’s transgressive 1976 masterpiece for something tawdry or even sinister. The first time you watch Ōshima Nagisa’s “ In the Realm of the Senses,” it might seem like more of a horror movie than a love story.

In the realm of the senses movie