In the Realm of the Senses

Dana Stevens, the Slate film critic, acknowledged this as one of the films she revisits consistently, in part for its "formal perfection" and portrayal of the "centripetal logic of obsession." In its treatment of obsession and desire, it bears some similarity to "The Devil in Miss Jones," except that movie gets preachy towards the end. The setting -- a brothel in Japan -- has some similarities to Sword Scabbard Island in "Pirates," a place of isolation, localized and minute, where the external has no place and the internal, the world of fantasy, can roam free. In this sense it is not too unlike the role of the forest in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "As You Like It." Also, the location in a geisha house allows some scenes of the man and woman to, in a sense, perform in front of other geishas, who in turn are performing for them. This sense of the allegorical displacement of the viewer, the dislocation of "the other," the very nature of art, was addressed more prominently -- and, in my mind, more successfully -- in "Behind the Green Door." The film's formal beauty might be seen in the balancing of each shot, and in the careful placement of the frame when cutting between scenes of the couple and those watching them. It also has some interesting use of imagistic foreshadowing, like when she sees a knife and starts, and then she goes on to use it unforgettably, and unforgivably, towards the end, or where the man drinks tea and kisses her and some goes in her mouth but some spills out, and then later when a similar thing happens with another liquid.