Ever wanted to see a Japanese woman lay an egg? Do you occasionally wonder how a human corpse would look cooked, seasoned, and served with carrots? If so, head to the Magdalen auditorium this weekend. The college’s film society will be showing Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976) on Sunday, and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover (1989) on Monday. Although they are not being presented as a double bill, the two films have points in common: both centre on the explicit depiction of carnal love, both end with one of the principal characters losing his penis, and both were partly financed by France.
In the Realm of the Senses tells the true story of prostitute Abe Sada, who in the 1930s was caught wandering the streets of Tokyo, her lover’s testicles in hand. The film shows the relationship between the two, which ends in her arrest. We witness the couple making love again and again, in ever more sordid fashion, until the suffocating claustrophobia of the bedrooms is mirrored in their games of erotic asphyxiation. Oshima shoots everything in reds and yellows, and he gradually ups the saturation as the film progresses. In the final scene, Abe chokes her partner to death and robs him of his member; never was Japan’s patriarchal society more vividly emasculated onscreen.
The Cook… is another film about a woman asserting herself in a dominantly male environment. Albert (Michael Gambon) is a gangster and restaurateur, Georgina (Helen Mirren) his reluctant wife. While Albert holds court in his restaurant night after night, drunkenly abusing his staff and spitting at his guests, Georgina pursues a secret affair with a regular client, the gentle, bookish Michael. Albert soon finds out, and has Michael killed. In revenge, Georgina asks the restaurant’s chef to cook the corpse, which she then forces Albert to eat. The plot is bonkers, but played out in the confined space of the restaurant – where people are constantly consuming – it makes sense. As Georgina and Michael make love in the kitchen, the larder, anywhere they won’t be found, the link between food and flesh becomes plain to see.
So Oshima associates sex with death, and Greenaway with gastronomy (although he also plays Michael’s naked corpse for erotic effect). I hesitate to ascribe this to cultural differences, even if The Cook…‘s vision of greed and decadence is a caricature of Thatcherism. Ultimately, both films get carried away with smashing taboos, and as documents of sexual customs in their respective societies they are unreliable. Japan may have a history of truly out-there sex offenders, but Oshima doesn’t care why Abe loses her marbles, or whether she represents a genuine social malaise; by cutting the two protagonists off from the outside world and confining them to their bedrooms, he suggests that they are an isolated case.
Greenaway too is more interested in style than characterization. He hints at domestic violence in Albert’s and Georgina’s relationship, which he suggests may stem from Georgina’s inability to bear children, but instead of expanding this plotline he trots off into cannibalism territory. The best things about The Cook… are Michael Nyman’s stately score, Jean-Paul Gaultier’s costumes and the deliberately artificial set, which wobbles when struck. There is nothing realistic about the film’s environment or its characters. As with In The Realm of the Senses, it is a theatrical chamber piece, too bizarre for the outside world.
