Directed by Nagisa Ôshima. Written by Fûtarô Yamada and Nagisa Ôshima
“It’s difficult to deal with a man filled with lust,” says a nurse about midway through Nagisa Ôshima’s The Pleasures of the Flesh, but soon she’ll encounter something worse: a man filled with heartbreak who thinks enough satisfied lust can feel like love.
That man’s Atsushi (Katsuo Nakamura) and he’s onerous. He’s a tutor who develops a crush on his schoolgirl tutee and in his devotion, agrees to murder a man who molested her in the past. A stranger observes him doing so, and thinks Atsushi the perfect accomplice in a crime of his own. He’s a bureaucrat embezzling public funds, and he deposits 30 million yen in Atsushi’s care, telling him he’ll come for the money once he has done his inevitable prison stint. Don’t touch it! Otherwise this man will turn in Atsushi for murder.
But when Atsushi receives an invite to his tutee’s wedding, he spirals, and The Pleasures of the Flesh is a year-long bender where Atsushi tries to burn through the cash and kill himself before the bill comes due. In a gambit as old as time itself, he spends the money on women, drowning them in cash asking them to fake wifely affections. If it looks like the real thing, it’ll feel like the real thing… right? Right!?
It’s a pitiable existence and watching The Pleasures of the Flesh is to watch a wounded animal thrash through the forest finding nothing but broken embraces. The more branches Atsushi snaps off, his folly becomes more and more obvious, as the motivation of women who indulge Atsushi’s house-playing scheme are far more honorable, or at least honest, be it supporting their families, or toiling away in sex trafficking trying to extract themselves. With these constellations, Ôshima paints a dark picture of Japan, where one of the most sacred bonds is perversified out of economic necessity.
The sacrifice of his companions makes Atsushi all the more pathetic of course, given how his rampage stems from an obsession with a minor, and the black heart of The Pleasures of the Flesh couples with Ôshima’s touch for sensuous filmmaking to plunge you into a feverish nightmare of a movie. It features see-through bodies, close-ups of longing faces, eager lips, and needy embraces, and it all swirls before you before Ôshima pulls the camera back to throw cold water on everything, showing us the stark realities of Atsushi’s ploy.
Despite these spellbinding sequences, The Pleasures of the Flesh sounds more hollow as it goes along, because the story beats the same drum to diminishing returns. The motivation and outcome of every engagement differs very little from the one that precedes it, making it more of a frenzied insistence than any pervasive argument. A late addition of fate’s cruel ironies does nothing to change your experience of all that came before, leaving it a monotonous experience of one man’s emotionally bankrupt tantrum and the ill society enabling it.
Mikkel Frederiksen 