An elderly Kyoto art dealer attempts to keep his sexual potency alive by sundry means; when injections fail him, he tries jealousy, arranging liaisons between his still beautiful wife and a starving intern, his daughter's fiancé. This wonderfully perverse family drama would be black comedy, but for its prevalent mood-as Donald Richie describes it, "a new interpretation of the love-death theme, in which some of the most sordid of human actions are captured by means of the sheerest physical beauty." This is found in cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa's experiments with color. He creates an architecture of claustrophobia and voyeurism in dark hallways shot through by sudden light; drama in a stand of bamboo shimmering in the night wind; and an extraordinary physicality (Pauline Kael noted, "I don't think I have ever seen a movie that gave such a feeling of flesh"), always at arm's length. Based on a Tanizaki novel, the film is ultimately Ichikawa's masterpiece of irony, the triumph of a dying man's ecstasy. (JB)