There is something almost elemental about this progression. In nature, possession and reproduction are not governed by the moral categories human beings construct around them. Animals can fight, dominate, mate, and kill within instinct. These lovers seem to descend toward something similarly primal, but with the terrible difference that they possess human consciousness. They understand what they are doing and continue anyway. The tactile senses become all-consuming with smell, taste, guzzling and sudden pouring on flesh of sake ( not warm) that, in the context of the film, could be taken as something else.
The final destruction of the lover therefore feels less like a sudden departure from the relationship than its ultimate expression. The result is foreshadowed by a session with material straps that shift and hold. Sada does not merely want Ishida sexually; she increasingly wants to possess him completely. The horrifying logic becomes: if he cannot exist as entirely hers, then he cannot exist at all. Love becomes indistinguishable from annihilation.
This is where the film has an unexpected connection with works as different as Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Takashi Miike’s Audition. Greenaway similarly transforms appetite, sexuality, food and violence into a theatrical world in which desire eventually produces literally consuming destruction. The violent Audition, meanwhile, understands the disturbing potential hidden inside romantic fantasy: intimacy can contain domination, resentment and violence that remain invisible until the relationship reaches its breaking point. The eroticism to remain genuinely seductive. The viewer is not standing safely outside the couple’s world and condemning it.
Sada Abe holds a knife over a motionless Kichizo Ishida in A Woman Called Sada Abe.
“Masaru Mori’s cinematography makes this enclosed world extraordinarily seductive.”
The ending is very similar to Greenway’s film but more perverse and drawn out. Wrapping the removed anatomy in paper, sleeping with it on a pillow, putting it into one’s crotch under the clothes you put on when you are off to another client. That client even remarks again that Sada has an “odour”. Literally bathing in blood to the point of necrophilia is presented—the ultimate ownership of someone.
Junko Miyashita’s Sada is seductive, damaged, playful, controlling, and vulnerable, sometimes within the same scene. She cannot be reduced to either victim or monster. She admits to using so many aliases after becoming a Geisha and being tossed out by her family due to an assault that she had lost herself. Eimei Esumi’s Ishida similarly becomes increasingly trapped inside the relationship, and the shifting balance between them gives the film much of its psychological tension. He still works and goes home to his wife but always drifts back into the arms and other parts of Sada.
A Woman Called Sada Abe is extreme cinema of the ‘Pink film’ variety from an ordered society different from the North American one in censorship, which later created more explicit work that became the porn industry. It is not simply nudity, sexual experimentation, luxury, or perversity. This is when appetite ceases to know when enough is enough. What one person sees as liberation, another sees as corruption, which is the role of the audience. You practice self-censorship if you want, or you watch. Beneath its eroticism is something much older and darker: the possibility that the desire to possess another completely contains, from the beginning, the desire to destroy them.
"…Love becomes indistinguishable from annihilation."
