She is in denial that she might be having an extra marital affair-just harmless meals with an interesting new friend-and her way of convincing herself is to make sure that they don’t get physically intimate. She is torn between the moral and the carnal. This is emphasised in several occasions when their hands come close, but Nirmali is careful to withdraw at the last moment. Nirmali and Sumon, on the other hand, don’t even touch each other, even though the sexual tension is palpable in every frame. Kichizo is only too happy to go one notch higher when he suggests a crazier idea: he inserts an egg in her vagina, asks her to lay it like a hen, and then eats it. The only time we see them eat is when food and sex combine, as in one of the most notorious scenes in the film-and in film history-where she offers him rice cake dipped in her cum (‘They say true love means eating food dipped in your lover’s juices,” she says).
When one of the geishas arrives outside their door to serve some food, Sada says they’d rather not eat because “a full stomach makes you feel sleepy”. The lovers in Realm are so consumed by their sexual activity that they don’t get time to eat. It’s important to note here that sex is curiously absent in Aamis-just like food is curiously absent in Realm. It comes to a point where the men in both the films are ready to undergo bodily harm to satiate the seemingly insatiable appetite of the women. And Oshima films Sada and Kichizo in way that it becomes clear who is steering the sex the camera is from her point of view and mostly she is mounted on him, and not the other way round. Sumon feeds Nirmali in a literal sense (a sly overturning of the adage that a woman’s way to a man’s heart is his belly). In both cases the men give the women the push to experiment and soon, they’ll discover what crazy hunger they have unlocked in them.įrom the beginning, he’s been the giver in the equation and she the receiver. It starts with wild rabbit, and the choices get wilder: baby pigeon, bat.ĪLSO READ: THE STARTLING SIMILARITIES BETWEEN ZNMD AND ARANYER DIN RATRI
He is hardcore meat lover, doing his PhD on the meat-eating traditions in North East India, who introduces her to different kinds of meat, taking her to offbeat eateries that serve unusual meat (when he is not dropping off tiffins boxes at her clinic). Even their meet-cute is meat-related his friend has had a bout of food poisoning after a night of gluttonous revelry and looking for a doctor, he rings her bell on a Sunday morning. Nirmali and Sumon–unlike Sada and Kichizo–are able to carry out their intensely private moments in public places in broad daylight. If the games are explicitly sexual in Realm, in Aamis it is covertly so. He suggest the kinks at first, stopping her on the way to the washroom one night and asking her to do it with “a full bladder” because it results in better sex. Kichizo initiates it, seducing the initially shy, folksy, Sada when she is cleaning the floor in his house and soon they are inseparable in bed, locked up in one of the rooms in the nearby inn, away from his wife. Sada and Kichizo engage in extreme sex, all the time, in as many ways as possible, constantly pushing the upper limits of satisfaction.
I use the word ‘game’ because there is an element of playfulness and fun in their actions that makes the viewer take part without judgement, leaving aside moral hangups-at least, for a while, until things get really messed up.ĪLSO READ: THE TIES THAT BIND ARVIND DESAI KI AJEEB DASTAAN AND TAXI DRIVER
The couple at the centre engage in a dangerous and pleasurable game that goes out of hands. In fact both end similarly, with the lovers being subjected to public shaming after the story comes out in the open.īut in terms of what happens in between-and this forms the heart of the two films- Aamis and Realm share something unique. On the face, the Assamese film Aamis, the most talked-about Indian indie film from 2019, directed by Bhaskar Hazarika, is closer to Passion than Realm: Nirmali (Lima Das), a paediatrician in Guwahati, married, with a son, meets Sumon (Arghadeep Baruah), a young guy and so on.