Ooh-La-La Land: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* (*And The Cannes Film Festival)

Yahoo

15-05-2025

For more than 70 years, the Cannes Film Festival has been synonymous with sex, and we can credit an 18-year-old Brigitte Bardot for bringing them together. Bizarrely, though, this had nothing to do with movies. Despite her global fame as a sex symbol, the actress, now 90, has only ever had one contemporary film accepted by the festival. Even then, it was as part of an ensemble, in a section of a three-part 1968 portmanteau called Spirits of the Dead, directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini. All three stories were based on stories by Edgar Allen Poe, and Bardot appeared in Malle's section, William Wilson, the macabre story of a man (Alain Delon) haunted, and taunted, by his double. It never screened, though. As part of a countrywide protest — ironically, brought to boiling point in Cannes by Malle himself — the whole event was canceled.
But, by then, Bardot had already established her place in Cannes history; just like Marilyn Monroe — chosen for the poster of the festival's 2012 edition without ever having been to France, let alone the south of it — she represented a moment in time. In Bardot's case, it was the emergence from the doldrums of the Second World War, posing on the beach in 1953 to promote her starring role in the otherwise inauspicious Manina, the Girl in the Bikini. The film was quickly forgotten but the beachwear was not.
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Although the bikini was an immediate postwar invention — named after the nuclear testing that took place on Bikini Atoll, a coral island in the Pacific Ocean — it had taken its time to catch on. In Hollywood, naked navels were a no-no and specifically outlawed by the censorious Hays Code that policed the studios until 1968. Fashion guru Diana Vreeland first championed them in a 1947 edition of Harper's Bazaar. 'Bikinis were the biggest thing since the atom bomb,' she said later. 'America wasn't ready for it yet but I'm a reporter, I know news when I see it.' Six years later, B.B. proved her right.
At that time, Bardot was — understandably, as a young woman — nonplussed by the reaction. She claimed very innocently later that she'd been picked 'at random, for want of anyone better,' and, at a stretch, it's perhaps true, but only insofar as her bikini was rather demure, especially by modern standards. Nevertheless, a door had been opened; almost immediately, the concept of sex was now in the festival's DNA, if not on its screens. The idea of actual sex, however, would, like the bikini, take longer to bed in.
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Fast forward 60 years, and Cannes is, by now, well known for how far it is prepared to go. The 2006 post-premiere beachside party after John Cameron Mitchell's XXX-rated polysexual comedy Shortbus engaged the press much more than the film's graphic scenes of intimacy. Abdellatif Kechiche's 2013 graphic lesbian love story Blue Is the Warmest Color confounded cynics by winning over a jury headed by, of all people, Steven Spielberg. And the festival regularly welcomes Gaspar Noé, whose 3D film Love literally ejaculated all over a rapturous midnight audience in 2015. Last year, the Palme d'Or went to Sean Baker's Anora, the story of a New York lap-dancer.
One film, however, still stands out, nearly half a century later. Directed by Japan's Nagisa Ōshima, the fiftysomething star of the country's new wave, In the Realm of the Senses debuted outside the official selection, in Directors' Fortnight, in 1976, a year after Chantal Akerman's now-acclaimed Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles premiered there. The two films might seem worlds apart, but they are very much connected. Both depict women involved in sex work and both result in equally disturbing ends — but for very different reasons.
The seed of the film was sown at the Venice Film Festival, where Ōshima premiered his film Dear Summer Sister in 1972. Though shot in an untypically breezy style, this story of a young girl from Tokyo going to meet her half-brother in Okinawa packed a surprisingly political punch, especially in the way it brought up the still-raw issues of the way Japan seemingly abandoned the latter territory in 1945. One admirer in particular was French producer Anatole Dauman, a staunch defender of the avant garde in his homeland, having worked with the likes of Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson.
'Dauman suggested that we collaborate on new film, an idea I naturally found very exciting, although I had no idea what kind of film he had in mind,' said Ōshima, who died in 2013. 'When I asked, he said, 'Let's make a porno flick!' This surprised me at first, but when I stopped to think, I realized it could be a very good idea to take a shot at something like that.'
The timing of such talk was not at all coincidental. In the States, a few months earlier, Deep Throat had made a star of Linda Lovelace and created a phenomenon soon to be known as 'porno chic.' Writing about the film in the New York Times in 1973, Ralph Blumenthal said, 'It has drawn an average of 5,000 people weekly to the New Mature World Theater on West 49th Street here, including celebrities, diplomats, critics, businessmen, women alone and dating couples, few of whom, it might be presumed, would previously have gone to see a film of sexual intercourse, fellatio and cunnilingus.' Author Truman Capote, he reported, caught it after dinner one night with a bunch of friends, adding that he went because 'Mike Nichols told me I just had to see it.'
Meanwhile, something similar was happening in Ōshima's homeland. Just as America's sex film industry had started out with tame but boundary-pushing nudity, Japan had its own equivalent, starting with the 'pink films' of the '60s and moving into the 'roman porno' films of the early '70s. There was, however, one vital difference: Japan was perfectly happy to stay in the world of softcore and had no plans to take things further.
Ōshima came up with two ideas, the first being a short story called What I Found Under the Papering in the Little Room by Nagai Kafu. Dauman nixed it, but, as you'll see, its influence carried over. The author, noted Taipei Times writer Bradley Winterton in 2008, 'is a fascinating figure. Originally an editor of literary magazines specializing in the newly fashionable French naturalism, [Kafu] abandoned that work in order to embark on a life investigating Tokyo's erotic underworld. This was partly done, no doubt, for its own sake, but it was also undertaken in a spirit of devotion to the ethos of the old, pre-modern Japan, the traditions of which Kafu felt were in part preserved in the teahouses and theaters around which the geishas and other women of the night circulated.'
The second suggestion was the one that captured Dauman's attention. It was the true story of Sada Abe, a Tokyo geisha who, in May of 1936, became the most wanted woman in the country. Having fallen into a torrid relationship with her former boss, Kichizō Ishida, Abe had become obsessed with him — and he with her. Finally, things became so intense that Ishida developed a fascination for erotic asphyxiation, which is how Abe came to strangle him to death in a love hotel one night. Faced with her lover's lifeless body, Abe cut off his genitals with a kitchen knife, wrapped them inside a magazine cover, and vanished in the early hours.
In the two or three days that she was deemed to be at large, Abe, literally, caused panic wherever a lookalike was spotted. But after she was arrested, handing over Kichizō's missing items as proof, a very different picture began to emerge. Abe gave herself up to police and admitted that she was planning to commit suicide, all the while holding onto her lover's penis. Why did she take it? 'Because I couldn't take his head or body with me. I wanted to take the part of him that brought back to me the most vivid memories.'
At trial, Abe was willing to accept the death penalty. 'The thing I regret most about this incident,' she said, 'is that I have come to be misunderstood as some kind of sexual pervert… There had never been a man in my life like Ishida. There were men I liked, and with whom I slept without accepting money, but none made me feel the way I did toward him.' This reframing of the murder as a crime of passion proved surprisingly successful, especially with the public's opinion. Abe was out within five years. Indeed, anticipating America's Lorena Bobbit many decades later, she was now a celebrity.
Sada Abe's story might seem like a gift from the gods, but Ōshima was stymied as to how he would do it. For three whole years, until summer 1975, when the French authorities removed all restrictions on the making of pornography. 'The moment I heard that,' he said, 'I thought, 'Alright!' Since our film was planned as a co-production between France and Japan, if we called it a French film, we would have perfect freedom to show whatever we wanted. In that case, why not make something hardcore? What had once seemed so difficult now seemed terribly easy: I could shoot the film in Japan and then have it developed and edited in France. Even the final cut could be done there.'
The more obvious problem, however, was finding two leads that would be prepared to have sex on camera. Ōshima was astonished when his own wife, Akiko Koyama, expressed an interest. 'I was floored by this,' he said later, 'but she later explained that she had only said it to help the process — that if word got out that she was willing, then other actors would know it was a good role.'
Eiko Matsuda, who plays Sada Abe, was the first actor to audition for the part. 'She had delicate skin, to be sure,' said Ōshima, 'but it was the delicacy of her heart, something one could see right off the bat, that made me want her in this role.' Kichizō, however, was more problematic. Said Ōshima, 'It shocked me how hung up men are about the size of their penis. It might have come across as cute if they had said, 'I'm a bit on the small side,' and stopped there. But, no, they had to add that they were 'bigger than most' when they were 'in action,' a lame excuse if there ever was one. The experience made me feel that men are really pitiful creatures who get hung up on the most trivial things. Later I realized that the confident ones were the few who said, 'I'm just average.''
The actor he cast was Tatsuya Fuji, then in his mid-thirties and a familiar face in Nikkatsu's pulpy Stray Cat Rock series. He, too, was slow to commit. 'My initial reaction was, 'Page after page of just sex scenes?! Whoa… Has Nagisa Ōshima lost his mind?' I binge-read the whole thing, and then, experiencing a somewhat mysterious emotion that I couldn't pin down, read it through about twice, more at a furious pace, after which I felt a jolt as if I had been struck on the head. What had become distinctly visible beyond the many sex scenes was the story of one woman and one man's life-staking love. It was a screenplay that depicted irrepressible human pathos.'
The set, naturally, was closed. 'Outsiders were strictly banned,' said Ōshima. 'We were extremely worried that, given our film's unprecedented nature, the police might come barging into the Daiei Kyoto Studio at any time.' And with good reason; the scenes depicted in the film still pack a punch in 2025, and the like won't be seen again in a hurry.
The result, though, is a mesmerizing study of what we now call toxic co-dependency, and, once seen, it's impossible to think how Sada Abe's story could ever be realistically told without the intensity of the film's sex scenes (the film's original title was said to translate as Bullfight of Love, which would have given fair warning). Inevitably, the film was immediately banned in Japan, but a book containing the film's script and a dozen stills — in an echo of the case made in Italy about Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris — was tried for obscenity. Ōshima requested that the high court explain their definition of obscenity, but no reply was forthcoming, and the charges were dropped.
What's more surprising is the difference between real life and history. After leaving prison, Sada Abe parlayed her notoriety [called 'Sada mania'] into a kind of cabaret act, descending from a spiral staircase and glaring at men who playfully yelled, 'Hide the knives!' behind her back. Despite her infamy, nothing is known about her after 1970, and even rumors that Ōshima tracked her down to a Kansai nunnery are unconfirmed.
Time was not so kind, however, to the woman who played her; while Fuji went on to make many more films, returning to Cannes twice and winning Best Actor at the 2023 San Sebastian Film Festival for his performance in Kei Chika-ura's dementia drama Great Absence, his equally daring screen partner, also a professional, only made six more films before retiring from the screen in 1982, after receiving only offers for actual porn films and nude dancing.
As a headline for a piece by writer Erika X Eisen put it, 'Matsuda Eiko's career illustrates the erasure that occurs when women's creative work is falsely reduced to autobiography.'
The actress, however, bore no malice, moving to Europe until her death from a brain tumor in 2011, aged 58. 'Many women who've done less have had it worse,' she said.
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