Eiko Matsuda

Watch what Eiko Matsuda's face does in In the Realm of the Senses (1976), which is almost nothing. As Sada Abe she wants Kichizo, then she wants him not to leave, then she wants him not to sleep, and she plays each stage as the same look held a little longer. Most actors given an obsession to play show it climbing; Matsuda shows it already arrived. Tatsuya Fuji's Kichizo smiles and lets himself be led, and his smile does the moving so that she does not have to.

She came to Nagisa Ōshima from Shūji Terayama's Tenjō Sajiki, the experimental theatre troupe she joined in 1968 under the stage name Mako Ichikawa, and from a handful of early film parts, among them Sarii in Stray Cat Rock: Machine Animal (1970). Terayama's stage was a place for extreme material done without apology, and it shows. Ōshima wanted an actor who would do what the role required, unsimulated, and after a screen test he had one. That is nearly the whole of her career in front of a camera. What followed, from 1977 to 1979, was mostly pink films and supporting parts, including Eros Eterna (1977) for Kōji Wakamatsu, who had been the line producer on the Ōshima film. Her last screen role was Mari in the French production Cinq et la peau (1982). She then stopped, and lived in Europe, mostly Paris, before returning to Japan.

It is tempting to make that shape into a tragedy, and she declined the invitation. "It's easy to make out that I'm some kind of martyr, run out of my own country. But, believe me, it wasn't like that at all." We take her at her word, and judge the performance rather than the story around it.

Judged that way, it holds up better than the film. Ōshima builds the sex scenes as a progression, and somewhere around the hour we were restless and had stopped being surprised. Then came the scene with the old geisha, and later the one with the egg, and we were frightened for these two people, and the fear came from Matsuda, whose expression did not change at all. Retrospective accounts describe her presence as open and childlike next to the character's notoriety, and that is right; the openness is what makes the fixity alarming. Fuji has the more varied part and is the surprise of the film. Matsuda has the harder one, because she is asked to hold, for close to two hours, a look that most performers could not hold for a scene.

We cannot tell you what else she might have done, because almost nobody gave her the chance to show us. One performance is a thin basis for a reputation. This one bears the weight.