To the
Western eye, the East often embodies the stranger titillating the mind with either
fascination or suspicion at once unleashing a powerful urge for conquest. To
the extent that ethnocentrism is synonymous with superiority, the impulse to dictate
and domesticate the “other” can be very sexual in its impulse to control, to colonize.
This sense of potency obviously has a gendered nuance of dominance, especially
in a culture steeped in patriarchy and machismo.
Where Asians
are often objectified as tame or submissive, if not suffused with an earthy aura
of the mysterious, the unknown can spawn stereotypes that may reflect the dark
side of desire. Consider the geishas, the girls in a harem, the cabal of
concubines.
Exotic may as well be just another word for erotic. And
where it is mostly the female who fleshes out the image of victimhood even in non-Asian
countries, media representation of women—especially in the movies—is often rendered
skin-deep like whip marks or tattoos. Interviewed about her 1996 film Kama
Sutra: A Tale of Love, Indian director Mira Nair revealed: “I make films of issues that get under my
skin, and I made this film almost directly to counter the perversity with which
women are being presented on our screens, not just in India, but in the West as
well. I wanted very much to look back to a time in our country when sexuality
and love were something to be taken very seriously, as an art, as a skill, as
something sacred."
Where the
idea of an empowered feminism wears a Western hat or a short hair, it could be
nearly unimaginable for Oriental women to have fun flaunting themselves with
the cheerful air of a Marilyn Monroe over her wind-blown skirt.
Leave it to
the non-Western filmmakers, however, to render sexuality as a complex of human experience
within a social and cultural context.
Such is the dimension of sex in Asian cinema, where the evocation of the
most private act—whether lyrical, unsettling, or simply controversial—can
intuit a public issue that exemplifies a sociological imagination. More often
than not, lust is not the last word even in the ten greatest sex scenes fromAsian movies. For instance, Peque Gallaga’s Scorpio Nights (arguably one of the
finest in Philippine cinema), Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (Best Film at the at the
64th Venice Film Festival in 2007) or the works of Nagisa Oshima (who won the best
director prize in Cannes for his 1978 film Empire of Passion) can make sense of
this maxim: There’s more than meets the eye.
Beware of voyeurs,
doggone if they don’t give a damn even to the wisdom of Oshima’s odd but iconic
masterpiece In the Realm of the Senses:
