As lushly beautiful looking as any film I've seen by Oshima, and that's saying something. Otherwise, this seems like his most conventional movie, at least on the surface. This is one of the director's few films that could be described as a genre work- in this case the tradition of the Japanese ghost story. Yet I also read it as a take on American Film Noir, what with sexual obsession driving a single man and a married woman to murdering the latter's husband. But it reverses that genre's gender tropes, making the young man the figure of sexual power who leaves the otherwise decent woman astray. Oshima is, I think, playing with the audience's patriarchal expectations, making them squirm a bit at the notion of a woman being so overcome by lust as to abandon her principles. "Isn't it man who is supposed to be virtuous yet corrupted by beauty???!!!" At one point, it is implied that the film is only a depiction of hearsay, even within it's own narrational space. This makes the work more true to Oshima's style- implying a vision of Japanese society as one characterized by hypocritical sexual repression, rumor, and superstition.
Review of Empire of Passion
