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Ooh-La-La Land: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* (*And The Cannes Film Festival)
Sex on the Beach: A history of the raunchiest films to screen at the Cannes Film Festival
Directed by Japan’s Nagisa Ōshima, the fiftysomething star of the country’s new wave, In the Realm of the Senses debuted outside the official selection, in Directors’ Fortnight, in 1976, a year after Chantal Akerman’s now-acclaimed Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelle s premiered there. Though shot in an untypically breezy style, this story of a young girl from Tokyo going to meet her half-brother in Okinawa packed a surprisingly political punch, especially in the way it brought up the still-raw issues of the way Japan seemingly abandoned the latter territory in 1945. In the States, a few months earlier, Deep Throat had made a star of Linda Lovelace and created a phenomenon soon to be known as “porno chic.” Writing about the film in the New York Times in 1973, Ralph Blumenthal said, “It has drawn an average of 5,000 people weekly to the New Mature World Theater on West 49th Street here, including celebrities, diplomats, critics, businessmen, women alone and dating couples, few of whom, it might be presumed, would previously have gone to see a film of sexual intercourse, fellatio and cunnilingus.” Author Truman Capote, he reported, caught it after dinner one night with a bunch of friends, adding that he went because “Mike Nichols told me I just had to see it.”
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