To a certain extent they are, in that the New Wave prankster made a career of provoking his audiences via shockingly sexual explorations of human behavior, though none of his other films takes things to quite this extreme. And a good thing, too, because In the Realm of the Senses is an extreme case - the story of an amour fou between a hotel owner and one of his maids that builds to strangulation, S&M and the most personal of keepsakes (perhaps the only art film capable of challenging Lars Von Trier's Antichrist in the genital-mutilation department) - and I'd hate to imagine going through life thinking all of Oshima's films were like that. The Criterion guys have even made the introduction easier on audiences by featuring a new commentary by Japanese film scholar Donald Ritchie on both the DVD and Blu-ray editions that functions more as an overview of the director's career than a direct essay on the film itself.īut as luck would have it, the release coincides with a traveling Oshima retrospective organized by James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario, which helps put the film in context. It's certainly his most famous project, and in that respect, it's a logical place to start.

If you think of the Criterion Collection the way I do - as something of an ongoing film education - then In the Realm of the Senses is probably the first film by Japanese director Nagisa Oshima you'll ever see.