Ai no Corrida, etc.

[M Arnold]

Hi everyone.

Last weekend I went up to Tokyo and was able to see Shikijitsu and Ai no 
Corrida.  Shikijitsu wasn't as bad as I had heard, but it wasn't great.  
Anno still seems to be working out the themes he's been wrestling with since 
Evangelion.  There were times that I thought the newer film's 
pseudo-psychoanalysis bordered on the look of a teenage idol "image" video, 
though.  (The same thing might be said of Love and Pop, but in this case I 
felt more removed from the girl's problems... probably because the 
'director' was filming and narrating most of the time.  What do other people 
think?)  The cinematography was pretty good though, and overall I thought 
the movie was worth watching.

Ai no Corrida needs no introduction, of course.  It looked wonderful on a 
movie screen.  As far as the censorship goes, there was really hardly any 
mosaic; just enough to cover 'it' up, which sometimes meant nothing more 
than one tiny beige dot wiggling back and forth between the characters' 
legs.  In fact it's probably the least-censored "porno" I've seen in Japan, 
and there were a couple of split-second shots that I thought the censors may 
have missed.  The climax (*snip*) wasn't censored at all, but I don't recall 
if that scene was edited in the previous Japanese version or not.  Anyway, 
at this point there seems to be hardly any visual difference between 
censored and not censored.  I wonder how long it will be before totally nude 
bodies become legal.

Saturday was Cine Amuse's 5th year anniversary.  All movies were only 500 
yen!  I didn't even have to use my gaijin waribiki.  The seats were full and 
the audience for Corrida was fairly mixed; young men and women, some couples 
and a number of older men.  The theater also had a special "ladies' only" 
section reserved for women who came without male accompaniment.  This being 
a 'porno' movie in Japan, I'd be fibbing if I said I couldn't imagine a 
reason for that... but it still struck me as a little strange.  Or is this 
something that Cine Amuse does for all of its films?  (We've all heard the 
stories about trains, but are dark movie theaters dangerous as well?)  Do 
other theaters do anything like this?

I visited that wine bar I mentioned here again and spoke with the owner a 
little about the controversy surrounding Ai no Corrida in the 1970s.  He 
said he never saw the film, but he remembered that people would travel to 
Europe as well as Guam to see the film unedited.  I knew about the trips to 
Europe, but this was the first time I had heard that Oshima's film was also 
being shown in Guam at the time.

Mike Arnold
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