Pagan by name, deviant by nature. (A Woman Called Abe Sada (DVD))

Member Name: Brett Bligh

Product:	A Woman Called Abe Sada (DVD)
Date:	08/02/01 (129 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: a nicely cleaned up print; convenient subtitle options; detailed biographies.

Disadvantages: lack of major extras (such as director’s commentary); non-anamorphic print.

Based upon genuine events which actually happened in 1936 Tokyo, ‘A Woman Called Abé Sada’ is a claustrophobic piece of cinema looked upon by the Japanese as one of their ten best films of 1975 and yet completely unknown in the West. Here’s your chance to change that…



THE FILM

Abé Sada was a lonely and desperate figure, a woman who had been thrown out of her own household by her father at an early age and who had been forced to become a call-girl, waitress, and Geisha in order to survive. As the film starts, Sada is starting a marathon sex session with a married man, Kichi, with whom she has fallen in love. The intercourse becomes more and more bizarre and frenzied over time — the sex lasting several days — with the recurring appearance of a large and rather ominous-looking kitchen knife and the introduction of strangulation (with all of its attendant effects on various parts of the anatomy re: the alteration of blood flows) lending the whole proceedings an edge of the genuinely dangerous.

After strangling Kichi rather too hard during one of these sessions, Sada is forced to start nursing him back to health. With a ring of bruise round his neck, Kichi suddenly starts to express his shame, and says that he must go home for the weekend to his wife, children, and shop, and that he and Sada will be together again soon. Sada becomes determined to prevent Kichi’s leaving, and eventually decides to genuinely strangle him, killing him with the silk scarf that the pair had used previously. Sada, however, has now become seriously unbalanced, and this is not the last thing she intends to do with Kichi before she leaves…



THE DISC

 Distributor: Pagan (New Vibration Ltd.) [PADV105].

 Region: 0 (PAL encoding).

Region 0 discs are ‘unprotected’ and hence will play on British region 2 players.

 Type and case: D
VD5 with black amaray-style case.

 Running time: 77 minutes.

This appears to be shorter than the US cinema version, which was of 85 minutes’ duration (and, before someone suggests it, not all of this time difference can be attributed to the 4% PAL speedup rate), but longer than the usual European version which is 76 minutes long.

 Picture format: “original widescreen format” [approx. 1.85:1] letterbox widescreen.

No actual ratio is stated on the packaging, but 1.85:1 is a reasonable approximation. I won’t bother criticising the lack of an anamorphic transfer on this occasion since I think to expect that on a DVD release of such an obscurity is probably a bit much.

 Audio: Dolby Digital (Japanese language).

 Subtitles: English in-frame, English below-frame.

A nice little feature which is also included by the BFI on their ‘Yojimbo’ release — is there some rule somewhere which says that Japanese films always require more than one set of subtitles per disc?

 Extras: still gallery; biographies, the obligatory chapter selections.

The still gallery is for the most part uneventful as per usual, the one exception being those still of scenes which I do not recall seeing in the film itself, adding further weight to my suspicion that the print included on this DVD release is cut.

The biographies, surprisingly, are detailed and interesting, and obviously written by someone with enthusiasm for the subject matter. This makes quite a change from the usual list of age and directing credits, or whatever else seems to pass for ‘biographies’ nowadays.

Other than that, however, it has to be said that the disc is relatively sparse, without even animated menus (not that, to be perfectly honest, I particularly value these in a release anyway!).



CONCLUSION

When judging this
release I think it very important to keep in mind the very obscure nature (at least in this country)of the film being released, and then compare this release to that given to other films of a similarly limited sales potential. Compared, for example, to the releases from Vipco (another DVD label mainly specialising in obscurities), the disc presented here is positively excellent, with a very crisp print, removable subtitles in two screen positions and detailed biographies.

On this basis, the disc probably exceeds my expectations for the situation, and hence I would choose to judge it positively.

Summary: