Lost Paradise / Shitsurakuen (1997)

I keep thinking there must be dozens of movies about love affairs like Lost Paradise, but my mind goes blank trying to think of a comparable example. Kuki (Koji Yakusho) and Rinko (Hitomi Kuroki) are each married but they have fallen in love with each other. Because it is a Japanese movie and also is called Lost Paradise, we can pretty much guess where it is going from the very beginning but the process of getting there is fascinating.

The movie begins in the middle with Rinko at the train station asking Kuki to accompany her home, which he decides not to do, but the way she toys with his jacket buttons tells us they are not just friends from work. They meet at a hotel when they can both get away – Rinko’s husband is a doctor who sometimes works late and Kuki makes up company meetings as excuses for his wife as well as dodging out on errands from his office in the daytime – and as the movie progresses, the meetings occur more often. They are in love, apparently from the moment they saw each other. A very brief flashback tells us when he first saw her, but the first conversations and courting are skipped over. What we see is the physical passion through which the love is expressed.

This suggests a pinku film, but it takes a long time before we reach a bare breast or any simulated sex, after we have seen many a rendezvous. The cultural daring is in the kisses, open mouthed with active tongues that I don’t recall seeing in Japanese kissing scenes before. The passion and physical lust are real, almost palpable. This is a love expressed through sex, but both partners are completely committed to the other. No one is just playing around, no one is out for some variety from their marriage, and no one childishly hangs around the other’s home or work-place. They don’t go to movies* or eat in secluded cafes; they go to bed. In between, they wait desperately for their next meeting. Rinko even leaves her father’s deathbed to see Kuki.

Rinko’s was an arranged marriage in which she had been contented if not excited before she met Kuki, while he had loved and still does love his wife and their now-married daughter. But neither had ever been “in love,” which is not quite the same thing. Nor have the older men in Kuki’s office, many of whom dream of “falling in love” just once before they die.

Both think they are being discreet, but Rinko’s husband has hired a detective and both Kuki’s wife and his daughter have figured it out as well. Kuki is actually stunned that his wife asks for a divorce, but Rinko’s husband adamantly refuses to agree to a divorce, so the couple can not marry.

Sada Abe is mentioned in passing, and certainly Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses and the other Sada Abe movies deal with a similar physical connection between the two lovers. Nevertheless, the depiction of such an all-consuming passion is more closely paralleled in Oshima’s Empire of Passion, though Kuki and Rinko are not led to crime. They live in a comfortable upper-middle-class world, and even when they find their affair revealed they are not in danger of poverty (The hotel they use is so posh it even gets a  mention in dialogue and a screen credit). It certainly does not hurt that the supposedly 50-year-old Kuki is played by the 40-year-old Yakusho who has never looked better, nor that the late thirties Kuroki is sleek and gorgeous.

This placement in the comfortable layer of society allows a focus on the love alone. Money is never an issue as it was for Sada and her lover. This is not the desperate love suicide world of Chikamatsu, where society makes the couple outcasts and they have no choice but death. Kuki will merely be sideways promoted, not fired, from his executive publishing position when anonymous accusations are made about him. Rather, it is a depiction of physical love so strong that it becomes spiritual, a merging of two souls through sex. It is a love-death, to use a Wagnerian term, told on a modern, domestic scale.

The passion slowly increases, each visit a bit more intense, each waiting period a little more nervous. We don’t follow the pinku and porn traditions of varied positions or sex in exotic locations; as far as we can see their sex is almost always “missionary” position and there are no long, indulgent monologues so we are not in a sort of Last Tango in Tokyo. The first major exploration of a torso is of Yakusho’s. For Rinko, each visit brings her orgasms more intense (though we are shown no ecstatic moaning or eye-rolling), not only as pleasure for her but more importantly as a closer merging with him. As Rinko expresses it, her skin passes through his so that they become one being. Though we see more screen time with Yuki (and see more of his body), the explanation of the feelings is given almost completely to Rinko. Perhaps this has something to do with a screenplay by a woman, Kyoko Morinaga in her only known writing credit, though the movie is based on a novel by Junichi Watanabe.

Directed by Yoshimitsu Morita, the movie was a surprise hit, out-drawn only by Princess Mononoke. Morita had spent his early years in pinku, so sex as a subject on film was no stranger to him. Nevertheless, he had long since moved away from the pink film, taking on more varied studies of love after the box-office failure of Family Game. Far back in the recesses of my mind, I remember a reviewer criticizing 9½ Weeks made a decade earlier who said, “You can make a movie about love without sex, or a movie about sex without love, but you can’t make a movie about sex without sex.” Lost Paradise seems to be the exception. It is a movie about the power of sex with the sex acknowledged but not simulated in full until the very end.

* We do see them attend a Noh play by torchlight. I assume it has something to do with the movie thematically, but since I am unable to identify the play itself, I do not know for certain.