The return of Nagisa Oshima | Film | The Guardian

The return of Nagisa Oshima | Film | The Guardian

Sex and the samurai

Nagisa Oshima made two of the most notorious erotic films ever to test the censor. Then a stroke left him near paralysed. But now the great taboo-buster is back - with a story about gay warriors

In recent years, the New York film festival has been a celebration of Asian film: Edward Yang's Yi Yi; Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love; Im Kwon-Taek's Chunhyang; Takeshi Kitano's Brother; Platform, by Jia Zhang Ke; and, of course, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which takes him back to his Asian roots. Yet that list omits the least expected and perhaps most welcome offering - the Japanese film Gohatto (Taboo), which marks the return to feature film-making of Nagisa Oshima after a 14-year absence.

1. Gohatto
2. Production year: 1999
3. Country: Rest of the world
4. Cert (UK): 15
5. Runtime: 100 mins
6. Directors: Nagisa Oshima
7. Cast: Beat Takeshi, Ryuhei Matsuda, Shinji Takeda, Tadanobu Asano, Takeshi Kitano
8. More on this film

Some day, some writer must attempt a study of directorial careers that takes in rhythm, stamina, neurosis and confidence, plus the waning of impulse or need, as well as the passion that sometimes creates several great films a year. Suffice it to say that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, any film buff asked to name the most dynamic living Japanese director would have answered Oshima. Yes, Akira Kurosawa was alive and active still, but, even in those days, Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985) were regarded as the nostalgia of an old master, a little too much in love with horsemen, lances, banners and mist.

Kurosawa turned 70 in 1980, while Oshima was not yet 50. Born in 1932, and a graduate of Kyoto University, he had entered film in 1954 and been an assistant to Yoshitano Nomura and Masaki Kobayashi. He made his directing debut in 1959, with A Town of Love and Hope. By 1971, he had made 18 films. The rush of production was Godardian, and the two were over-compared if only because of that enthusiasm and their concentration on young people in situations where emotional and political life were interactive.

In fact, that was a greater achievement for Oshima who, for the most part, insisted on modernity in Japanese films, despite the traditional respect for period subjects. Nor was Oshima tempted by the classical family stories in which Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi had done some of their greatest work. Rather, he saw the ferment of postwar Japan, the incongruities of tradition and liberty, and the ways in which Japanese experience was mirrored in Europe and America. Oshima was an intellectual, well aware of western art and literature, conversant with politics, and determined to address the special Japanese view of the 1960s.

He was also a very assured operator in diverse styles: he could do documentary and surrealism; he could take an ordinary story out of the newspapers, see its historical resonance, and then recast the journalistic mode as something like Brechtian theatre. It was not easy to see all his films in the 1960s, and there is pressing need now for an Oshima retrospective. But his pictures are extraordinary, from Cruel Story of Youth, The Sun's Burial, Night and Fog in Japan (all 1960) to Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (1967), Death By Hanging, Three Resurrected Drunkards, Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (all 1968); Boy (1969) and The Ceremony (1971). By turns agitprop and lyrically beautiful, they were committed to the notion that the cinema can unearth the buried elements in a nation's psyche.

On the festival circuit, and in what was then an intense film culture, Oshima's stock stood very high. He had always been preoccupied with sexuality, violence and death. He was especially horrified by the sexual taboos still current in Japan, and he was driven to see sexual expression as the natural reaction to all other problems and social restrictions. He made what are still two of the most notorious erotic films ever to test our censors - In the Realm of the Senses (1976) and Empire of Passion (1978).

Both were French co-productions aimed at worldwide audiences. Such sensations date very fast and there is surely a generation of filmgoers now that has hardly heard of them. In the Realm of the Senses, set in 1936, is about a pair of illicit lovers who abandon all sense of reason or the outer world to pursue each other's bodies. Lovemaking excludes all else in life - or does it just hold back all the rules, codes and intrusions that want to smother desire? The affair becomes increasingly sadomasochistic, and finally the woman strangles the man and cuts off his penis.

Empire of Passion, set in 1895, concerns an adulterous love affair that is haunted by the ghost of the murdered husband. This time the sexual need is undercut by the disposition of the partners toward guilt. It is not as good or necessary a film as In the Realm of the Senses, which is both carnally exquisite and emotionally claustrophobic. There is at least a hint that the second film was made to cash in on the first - which is another reason for wanting a candid study of careers.

Oshima was by then something Japanese film had never known: an inter- national figure, prepared to work in the English language. There is some evidence that he found that status difficult. After a gap of four years, and with the Englishmen Jeremy Thomas as producer and Paul Mayersberg (the writer of Croupier) as his co-screenwriter, he made Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, from a Laurens van der Post novel about British officers in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.

This is a spectacular, fascinating film, with David Bowie as one of the leads and a superb score by Ryuichi Sakamoto (who also plays the Japanese commander). But Bowie really couldn't act well enough to bridge some unease in the cross-cultural ambitions. Still, Merry Christmas is far better than Max, Mon Amour (1986), in which Charlotte Rampling falls in love with a gorilla. With a script by Bunuel's pet writer, Jean-Claude Carrière, this ought to have made a delicious comedy, but it seems shy of its own potential outrage. It's as if Oshima had become weary of notoriety.

That was the last Oshima feature film before Gohatto. What happened? There were two documentaries - one about Kyoto, the other a history of Japanese film - and there were attempts to make something called Hollywood Zen. He also had a television show in which he offered advice for the problems of women. But in 1996, at Heathrow airport, Oshima had a stroke. He lost a great deal of movement and most of his speech. With exceptional will-power, he has regained enough of both to be able to work and to resume his television show.

Still, it leaves Gohatto - a study of what happens to an order of samurai warriors in the 1860s when a ravishing young man joins them - as the work of someone for whom movement is all the more precious. The taboo here is homosexuality, and the tone is clear, chill and ironic. But there are many able-bodied directors who do not have Oshima's eye or his economical storytelling. Of course, samurai and swords are very familiar, and Gohatto is more withdrawn than Oshima's greatest work. Yet no one else could have done this.

Will there be more? It's not clear. The last shots of Gohatto are filled with a breathtaking grace, and they could be seen as a Prospero-like farewell. But Oshima's return restores our sense of film history, and the vital way in which he pioneered modernism in Japanese cinema.

• Gohatto is released on August 3.