Based on the shocking true story of a geisha and sex worker who accidentally killed her lover in a lustful haze of unbridled passion and kinky sex, A WOMAN CALLED SADA ABE is a watershed of hallucinatory erotic cinema. Director Noboru Tanaka, who rose to prominence as one of Nikkatsu’s leading Roman Porno auteurs, framed the tale as both a “true document” and an ode to decadence that lays bare the candid details of the infamous couple’s obsessive relationship. Exquisitely shot with striking period piece production design and expressive mise-en-scène, the film’s raw emotional power is further exemplified by the bold and inspired performance of pink film and Roman Porno super starlet, Junko Miyashita.

Preceding Nagisa Oshima’s renowned telling of the same sensationalized crime, In the Realm of the Senses, by a year, A WOMAN CALLED SADA ABE is “more intimate, more cinematically stylized and arguably more erotic" (Midnight Eye).

“As much as Oshima’s version, this is a real movie about a sexual relationship, not an exercise in titillation or masturbation fantasies. [It] can hold its own in any comparison with Oshima’s version of the story and avoids the self-indulgence of Last Tango in Paris, another more famous movie about a couple held together in one room only by sexual passion.” –Japan on Film

DIRECTED BY NOROBU TANAKA
JAPAN | 1975 | JAPANESE WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES