Preceded by-Demain la petite fille sera en retard à l'école (Michel Boschet, 1978): Tomorrow the Little Girl Will Be Late for School. An animated film inspired by the work of the great Japanese artist Toshio Saeki. (4:30 mins, No dialogue, Color animation, 35mm) (Ai no borei). Nagisa Oshima was never a director to bow ceremoniously to audience expectation, so his long-awaited "sequel" to In the Realm of the Senses in many ways reacts against that film. Less explicit, it reveals more about the nature of love-unto-death. "My new film delves, more profoundly than In the Realm of the Senses, into the roots of life," Oshima said. The setting is a late-19th century village, meticulously and beautifully recreated; here, the lovers are not, cannot be, hermetically sealed off from society as they were in the earlier film but rather exposed to the pitiless social conventions of centuries. The film's crime passionel plot, though seemingly out of James M. Cain, is again based on a true incident. Seki, the wife of an elderly rickshaw driver, has an affair with a newly discharged soldier, Toyoji, a man twenty years her junior. They murder the husband, Gisaburo, but his ghost reappears to Seki and other villagers. Guilt, but moreover their mutual vulnerability, adds fire and tenderness to the lovers' passion; even under torture, each tries to protect the other. Whereas In the Realm of the Senses was Oshima's "breakthrough" film to an international audience (and banned in Japan), Empire of Passion rather looks back to films like Double Suicide; if nothing else its ghost story locates it in the Japanese tradition. "The ghost is a farmer's idea of a ghost, not a samurai's," Oshima noted. Revenge is the last thing on Gisaburo's mind; even in death, he wants his sake, and peace of mind all around.