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Product Detail |
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Audio Format: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Video Format: Full Screen Languages: Japanese Subtitles: English, Chinese Region Code: ALL Year Made: 1998 Running Time: 132
In 1936 a geisha named Abe Sada was found wandering around the streets of Kyoto with a knife, a rope, and a severed penis in her hands. The latter turned out to belong to her ex-lover Kichi, the rich owner of the hotel where she worked. The two had just spent a month together locked in a violent and passionate amour fou, barely emerging from their hotel room. As Sada's love became more obsessive, she began to take to throttling him to maintain his passion, eventually seeking to possess him entirely.
Noboru Tanaka's The Abe Sada Story plays by the rules laid down by the Japanese censors in its rendition of the tale, and unlike Oshima's, which was funded from abroad, was intended entirely for a domestic market. However, though the two films are poles apart in both approach and intention, they both cover pretty much the same ground. A shot by shot comparison would prove very, very interesting indeed, since although both films are aiming at provoking a completely different response, they both deliver a below-the-belt punch whose effectiveness depends very much on the strength of any castration anxiety of the individual viewer.
Whereas Oshima's version focuses intensely on the short period of time within which the liaison occurs, Tanaka introduces Sada's character in a series of antique still photographs and slips in a flashback towards the end of the film detailing her unhappy childhood and rape at the age of 16. The same tyings-up, strangulations, and erotic food incidents are present in both, yet there seem to be rather more scenes of her alone playing with sharp objects in this version. Tanaka's version is certainly the more accessible of the two. Aside from being less sexually explicit, it is also smaller scale, more intimate, more cinematically stylised and arguably more erotic.
As if these two versions of the same story weren't enough, Nobuhiko Obayashi gave us his take on events in the recent Sada (1998), a glossy MTV-styled version which by all accounts is more concerned with the backstory than the intimate details of the relationship between Sada and Kichi. It looks like this story could just run and run.
The oft-filmed life story of Sada Abe ? a courtesan who killed her lover during lovemaking and then cut off her favorite organ as a keepsake ? has been the stuff of legend for over 60 years. In Nobuhiko Obayashi's 1998 adaptation of the same story, he went for a less explicit, more postmodern tact; this film tries to get to the roots of Sada's motives. Born into a poor and lonely childhood during the beginning of the 20th century, Sada (played by television star Hitomi Kuroki) is raped at the age of 14 by a thuggish college student (Masaku Ikeuchi) but saved from further degradation by Okada (Kippei Shina), a mysterious medical student who sports sunglasses and a long black coat. She falls for him, but unfortunately Okada has a dark secret; he has leprosy. Just before he departs from society to go to an asylum, he carves out an imaginary heart from his chest with a scalpel and gives it to Sada. Unable to get over the heartbreak of losing her true love, she becomes a prostitute. At age 29, she becomes the lover of a wealthy civil servant named Tachibana (Bengal) who buys her out of prostitution and apprentices her to a teahouse. There she meets Tatsuzo (Tsurutaro Kataoka), with whom she discovers a passion that she never found in the arms of her thousands of johns. When his wife learns of their tryst, she kicks Sada out. Soon Tatsuzo ? who abandoned his wife ? and Sada are holed up in a dinky apartment as sexual fugitives. Feeling like he has lived all he needs to live, he encourages her to pull the chord across his throat as part of a kinky sex game. This film won the International Film Critics Prize at the 1998 Berlin Film Festival.
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