Empire of Passion

Director: Nagisa Ôshima

1978 / 105min / 35mm

After the scandal of In the Realm of the Senses, Oshima came back with an erotic vision every bit as potent, this time mixing the pleasures of the flesh with a touch of the supernatural to create a lyrical, unsettling film of passion and retribution that reunited him with Senses star Fuji. A woman and her younger war veteran lover (Fuji, in a performance of delicate nuance) plot to bump off her husband in 19th-century Edo-era Japan, but the perfect crime proves less than when the late spouse’s unquiet ghost returns. Oshima’s first and only kaidan (Japanese ghost story) is an atmospheric work steeped in Eros and Thanatos, owing not a little to James M. Cain’s hard-boiled classic The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Part of In the Realm of Tatsuya Fuji