Beauty’s Exotic Dance: Torture! (no 50)

by Allan Fish

(Japan 1977 83m) DVD2 (Japan only, no English subs)

Aka. Hakkinbon bijin ranbu yori: semeru!

What a bad karma!

p  Yoshihiro Yuhki  d  Noboru Tanaka  w  Akio Ido  ph  Masaru Mori  art  Takeharu Sakaguchi

Jinko Miyashita (Tae), Hatsuo Yamatani (Saiu Ito), Hiroshi Cho (doctor), Maya Kudou (Shima, 1^st wife), Sumiko Minami (Kane, Tae’s mother), Aoi Nakajima (Toki, 2^nd wife), Toshihiko Oda (Saeki, the photographer), Kunio Shimizu (assistant photographer),

“When I abuse a woman, I can see her many faces…nothing is more fun than toying with a living human being.”  If the title wasn’t enough to convince you, that quote should tell you we are strictly in the ‘not for Aunt Edna’ realms of seventies taboo.  Noboru Tanaka, if he’s remembered in the English speaking world, is known more for A Woman Called Abe Sada – a version of the same events depicted by Oshima in Ai No Corrida – or by The Watcher in the Attic.  Though neither were really major films, they both contrived to be rather memorable, but both pale beside this, his most shocking and yet impressive film.  Along with Kumashiro’s The Woman With Red Hair it probably represents the summit of that most lowly of cinematic strains, Japanese pinku eiga. 

            The film is largely told in flashback from various characters’ points of view, beginning when a woman is lowered bare-breasted into an outside barrel filled with freezing water and chunks of ice.  She thinks back to what got her here, back to finding a man drunk in the brothel where she worked, and how he tells her of how he loves to torture women, including his ex-wife, who has run away with another man.  Slowly but surely, the woman, Tae, finds herself perversely attracted to this sadist and agrees to let him do his worst.  Not the brightest thing to do, for here we are dealing with one of nature’s truest deviants.  She is lowered to the depths of humiliation, pain and absolute degradation by this perverted creature, who first gets photographers to take pictures of her being tortured and then moves on to more lengthy abuses. 

            A great deal of the credit must go to the peerless queen of Japanese sexploitation Jinko Miyashita, and her passivity and compliance is arguably more disturbing than the sadism of her tormentor.  Whether tied up in more variations of hanging torture than the sickest minds of the SS could dream of or being ordered to trudge through more than a foot of snow, back and forth with her hands tied behind her back, one can feel the pain scorch her like the hardest ice.  Ice burns, and in Tanaka’s film it burns like Rome under Nero.  One can feel every blow from the bamboo, every torment visited upon her. 

            Though belonging to the pink strain of Japanese film-making, one would have to seriously worry about anyone finding it arousing.  It could easily be called – along with Radley Metzger’s The Image – the ultimate film about S & M, and yet the two films are very different.  The Image dealt with the sexual release brought by submission and domination, and the orgasmic bliss of sex after pain.  Tanaka’s film has a few scenes of sex, but it’s more interested in the pain itself giving the pleasure, and as such it’s twice as disturbing as anything you’ll find in Metzger’s film.  Tanaka chooses to analyse the base desires of a truly sick individual.  By the end, he’s literally tortured her to death, helped along the way by her developing syphilis contracted in her mother’s womb, but after he’s buried her, he regrets doing so.  He can only think of the lost picture opportunity offered by her corpse.  By the end we feel like we, too, have been lowered not only into that ice bath but into some truly disturbingly muddy waters – few films make one want to bathe after watching it more than this film.  Yet it’s the matter-of-factness of the thing, the oh so real whimpers and anguished cries that give the film its power.  Well, that and some truly gorgeous ‘Scope photography.  It’s very hard to see in an English friendly format, but if you can seek it out do so, I guarantee you won’t forget it, though you may later want to.