In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korîda)

A married man and a geisha retreat from militarist Japan of 1936 into a world of their own where they obsessively act out their sexual fantasies. Finally, in a quest for the ultimate orgasm, she strangles and then castrates him. The story is based on an actual Japanese police case and cause célèbre in which a woman was found wandering the streets having apparently killed and mutilated her lover. The perpetrator of the crime because a national heroic figure symbolic of equal sexual rights. Oshima's first big commercial success was, for many, in the realm of pornography. For others, it was a serious treatment of the link between eroticism and death and an artistic breakthrough in the representation of explicit sex on screen.