It is nearing the twentieth century in Japan, and in this quiet village an ageing rickshaw driver called Gisaburo (Takahiro Tamura) would go about his business, confident in the knowledge that at the end of every hard working day his doting wife Seki (Kazuko Yoshiyuki) would be waiting for him with a warm bath and a nice drink of sake. However, he has noticed the young man Toyoji (Tatsuya Fuji), recently discharged from the Army, has been getting very friendly with his missus, and wonders aloud half-jokingly if the chap is overfamiliar, a notion Seki laughs off. Yet one day Toyoji arrives with a few cakes to share with her, and suddenly gets it into his head that this older woman really needs his sexual attention...
Of the two films that director Nagisa Oshima helmed in the mid-to-late nineteen-seventies, Empire of Passion was very much the lesser affair, lacking the explicit sex scenes of the first of the duo, In the Realm of the Senses, though they shared a leading man in Fuji. He had been requested by his French backers to repeat the success, both arthouse and porn theatre, of the earlier effort, but by this time he was labouring under an obscenity trial back home in Japan and was in no mood to create more trouble for himself by giving the authorities more ammunition. So what he did was adapt the James M. Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice to a period Japanese setting (there was already a Hollywood remake of that property shaping up across the Pacific).
On one hand, he stayed fairly close to the basics of the source, yet on the other he added various bits and pieces to make it more personal to his own point of view. If you were aware of what Postman entailed, a wife persuades her lover to murder her older husband and they suffer for the crime, then there would be no surprises here, only the twist was that in this case the wife was pushed into the killing rather than her doing the pushing of her lover, and Seki remained a curious victim figure, even more so than the old geezer who was bumped off. At least he was able to return as a ghost to embody her guilt, as that emotion was paramount in the tone of the piece, not that Toyoji endures much of that.
Indeed, so put upon was Seki that Empire of Passion quickly became overwrought, such was the character's anguish as three years pass and nobody is particularly bothered that Gisaburo has not been seen in all that time. There were strong hints that the director had been so invested in the plot and its resonances for him that he was rather remiss in running a tight ship, so by the time the Inspector, Hotta (Takuzô Kawatani), showed up it was clear Oshima had an axe to grind regarding his recent treatment. This meant the investigating officer was if anything viler than the lovers, pursuing his quarries with underhand means and contributing to the climax in a manner that suggested he was taking an unhealthy amount of pleasure in punishment, though as he was a police representative he was able to act with impunity.
In this telling, it was not the act of murder that was the lovers' most terrible crime, it was their appetite for sex that fuelled it, or that was the way it was treated by society in general. Oshima made such heavy weather of this self-righteous protest in the guise of a lust-crazed horror movie that you may be tempted to let him get it out of his system and leave him to it, but if you could sympathise with his concerns then you would be able to get something out of this. That said, so debased by their attraction to one another do the couple become that you wondered if the director had been turned off sex in the cinema for life as various illogical occurrences blighted the already near-hysterical screenplay and production. The scene in the well was so over the top that it was hard to take seriously, then there was the issue with characters disappearing as he lost interest in them, and the odd touches of eerie poetry such as the bloke who dreams of Gisaburo's ghost complaining he has been wearing the same clothes for too long were swamped in the filmmaker's rage. It held the attention, but a resolutely pissed off movie. Music by Tôru Takemitsu.
