Cult Movie Reviews: Marquis de Sade's Prosperities of Vice (1988)

Most film-makers who have the deeds of the Marquis de Sade as their starting point elect not to seek a straightforward version of any of his books but instead to do films that try to get some of the feeling or some of the doctrine of de Sade. Marquis de Sade's Prosperities of Vice (Akutoku no sakae) falls into this category.By 1988 Nikkatsu had deserted the roman porno movies that had kept the studio afloat for the previous decade-and-a-half.

As a consequence the sexual content in this film is often more moderate than would have been the face a few days earlier. The better of the roman porno films were a bold combination of sex, art and experimentation and in this case director Akio Jissoji is attempting something like but with more artiness and less sex.In the days earlier the Second Wold War a Japanese nobleman becomes preoccupied with de Sade. He founds a theater company that he uses as a way of exploring his own interpretations of the ideas of the Lord Marquis as good as his personal obsessions with sex, power, jealousy and cruelty. He recruits his actors exclusively from the criminal classes. They are mostly thieves and whores. Most of them share his decadent tastes so their sentence is devoted as practically to games of sexual power as to the house itself.Or sooner the games and the plays overlap. The film works on 3 separate levels of reality, or unreality - the performances of the plays, the rehearsals of the plays, and the offstage interactions between the players. All three layers intersect and reality and art become impossible to disentangle.Sexual betrayals are played out on level and tail the scenes. The nobleman manipulates his lover into a sexual contact with one of his actors (who is likewise a thief), while at the same time they are acting out a like post on stage. The lord has ever believed he could stay in control, pulling the strings and forcing everyone about him to dancing to his tune, but he discovers he is as vulnerable to feelings of jealousy as those whose lives he manipulates.The game isn`t easy to be in particular but this turns out not not be a disadvantage. It might still have been a deliberate ploy on the voice of the director. With art and reality bleeding into each other the protagonists themselves are not always sure what character they are playing, or where the dividing line is between onstage and offstage.If this all sounds very arty and pretentious, it is. But Akio Jissoji`s visual imagination makes it a lot more entertaining than you might look and the lines between the field and actual life are blurred so successfully that you can`t help but be fascinated.The film is helped by some real effective acting performances. One of the strengths of Nikkatsu`s roman porno films had been the luscious period detail. They may have been comparatively low-budget productions but Nikkatsu was even a major studio with the resources to provide lavish sets and costumes. That`s not so much in evidence in this film but peradventure that was intentional, an effort to make it more of a notion of unreality.As with nearly all Japanese exploitation movies there`s a political subtext with the Sade-obsessed nobleman being drawn into political conspiracies.This being a Mondo Macabro release you ask the transference to be superb, and it is. There are some reasonable extras, including an unfortunately all-too-brief consultation with Jasper Sharp. Sharp probably knows as much about Japanese erotic cinema as anyone outside of Japan and I`d have liked to see a bit more from him.Personally I found this film to be somewhat less impressive than around of Nikkatsu`s earlier roman porno movies but it`s still an intriguing and offbeat movie, another fascinating slice of movie weirdness from Mondo Macabro.