This is a bilingual edition (French and Japanese, printed back to back) of Nagisa Oshima's scenario for the film "Gohatto," which was released both in Japan and abroad earlier this year. The title refers to the penal codes that codified the actions of the Shinsengumi, that ad hoc army devoted to supporting the Tokugawa shogunate during the last days of the Edo era.
The codes held this military society together. They were strict -- breaking them meant execution -- and they were inhuman -- any means justified the expected end, and individuals judged to be a peril to the majority were to be liquidated. At the same time, the organization was vulnerable -- physical passion could destroy it.
This is a major theme in the films of Oshima: the power of private passion in confrontation with the constructs of mass society. "In the Realm of the Senses" shows the lovers' ardor triumphing over the ordered ranks among which we live. Their couplings are a criticism of our structured social lives, and in the end love masters even death.
Oshima returns to this theme in "Gohatto," but with a difference. In the earlier film, the man and woman defied and thus defeated social morality. Once heterosexual sex on screen had lost its transgressive power through repeated exposure, the director turned to another expression of passion -- one that still retains it.
The all-male Shinsengumi knows the threat of love. Early in this script there is a reference to a time when "lust ravaged the corps," and the leaders are determined that this will not occur again. Then into their midst comes a new recruit -- 18 years old, extremely handsome and willing.
Oshima chronicles his disruptive influence. Passion grips the manly group, discipline suffers, even the leaders prove susceptible -- love triumphs, death is close behind, the Shinsengumi begins to collapse and the Tokugawa ascendancy totters.
Much of the power of "In the Realm of the Senses" derived from the transgressive nature of the cinematic presentation itself. The sex was apparent, real, right there on the screen. This led film boards and even governments to conclude that the film was pornographic, and it was banned. Yet if pornography is defined as titillation, few less pornographic pictures than this have ever been made.
(Nonetheless, society perceives threats. The film has never been shown uncut in Japan and in its "uncut" Tokyo revival later this year, it will remain censored. Now that the "hair barrier" has been breached, it is no longer a social threat to show an actress whole, but whatever charms an actor possesses are still to be obscured by the Vaselined lens. Such is the relative importance accorded men and women in this country.)
In "Gohatto," it was not necessary to present sex in order to emphasize transgression. Homosexuality retains its politically transgressive quality and need not be illustrated for this power to be apparent.
The boy is buggered, but the bedding obstructs the view. The censor can find nothing to cut, and the viewer receives full blast the idea that making love is making freedom.
For Oshima, the beautiful and available boy is certainly an agent of destruction, even though what he destroys deserves it. At the end (departing from the Ryotaro Shiba novel on which the script is based), it develops that the youth knows perfectly well that he is an agent of destruction. Indeed, he seduces and then kills his lovers in order to more efficiently reduce the Shinsengumi.
While this is not spelled out in the script, we are left to infer it. Among the results is that "Gohatto" emerges as a somewhat more conventional film than "In the Realm of the Senses." The lovers in the earlier picture are truly anarchic, whereas the youth in the later one is a literary figure -- he has his agenda, love is a means to his end. To this extent, Oshima's allegory is compromised.
This French/Japanese edition is the script itself, not the film that was made from it. There are consequently a number of differences. Most are small. One would like to have seen more, however, of an interesting sequence in which the samurai, set on seducing the youth, sends away the woman who serves them. When she returns with more sake, she sees what is occurring.
There are then several scenes (not filmed, or at least not included in the film version) where our attention is directed toward her. We do not watch the act of love (and love it is -- the samurai is quite sincere). Rather, we watch the effect that this act, naturally perceived as a transgression, has upon the person who has been left out of it.
Love dissolves society's roles as well as its patterns. If sex is transgressive, it is also transcendent. Perhaps that is what the woman thinks as she sits there looking at that lighted window in a scene we will never see.
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