MADAME O: DEVIL OF A DOCTOR
A restored Asian cult classic proves hell hath no fury
like a woman wronged, especially one who wields a scalpel.
By Dean Brierly
“Dedicated to medicine…and the cold-blooded destruction of
men!â€
With a tagline like that, you just know you’re onto a
winner. And Madame O (1967), an outlandish, pungent slice of celluloid
kink, doesn’t disappoint. Ostensibly one of the cheap sex movies that flooded
Japanese cinemas in the 1960s (and which eventually morphed into the notorious
“pink†films in the following decade), Madame O transcends its tawdry
provenance, deftly blending the sexploitation, revenge and noir genres into an
oddly contemplative and affecting study of a woman slowly coming apart at the
mental and emotional seams.
The film’s heroine is a beautiful gynecologist in her
mid-30s with a thriving practice and a tragic past. As a 16-year-old girl,
Saeko suffered a gang rape that left her pregnant, infected with syphilis, and
saddled with guilt courtesy of a father who blamed her for provoking the
assault. It’s enough to turn a girl into a retribution-minded man hater.
“Before I realized it, I had grown into a woman who found pleasure only in
revenge—revenge against men for the brutality they had shown me,†Saeko relates
in voiceover. Her payback consists of picking up lonely men in tawdry bars,
taking them into her bed, and cold-bloodedly infecting them with syphilis (a
swift incision and swipe of bacteria-laden cotton) while they snooze in
post-coital bliss. Poetic justice, through a swab darkly.
Saeko’s single-minded quest is untainted by notions of
remorse or guilt at betraying the Hippocratic Oath. Indeed, inflicting rather
than curing disease provokes an exciting and intoxicating dichotomy in her,
another manifestation of her unbalanced psyche. Saeko also strikes back at men
in more oblique fashion, surreptitiously tying her patients’ fallopian tubes so
their husbands will begin to doubt their potency. Some might call that wrong.
Saeko would just call it mixing business with pleasure.
Unfortunately, not all good things last forever. Saeko’s
unabashed pursuit of vindictiveness and vengeance takes an unforeseen turn when
she carelessly becomes pregnant by one of her victims. In one of the film’s
most disturbing sequences, Saeko straps herself onto the operating table and
self-administers an abortion, only to pass out from the pain. Dr. Watanabe, a
recent addition to Saeko’s clinic, discovers her in this compromising position
the next morning and, much to her relief, promises to keep her secret. She is
further impressed by his selflessness and seeming lack of male predatory
impulses. For the first time in her life, Saeko finds herself falling in love,
to the point where she entrusts the good doctor with all the details of her
sordid past. Watanabe remains supportive even after he witnesses a blackmail
attempt by one of her former victims end in murder. Somewhat improbably, he
promptly marries Saeko, who by this time seems convinced that not all men are
devils. But wedded bliss is soon interrupted by a series of events that cast
her white knight in an entirely darker light. The film shifts into noir
territory at this point, with a succession of crosses and double crosses that
culminate in bleak and nihilistic fashion.
Director Seiichi Fukuda, who made a couple dozen such sex
films (almost all of them sadly lost), conjures highly charged widescreen
compositions to evoke Saeko’s twisted odyssey of sexual revenge. His visual
command is particularly effective during her nocturnal hunting forays. At one
point, Fukuda treats the viewer to a provocative close-up of Saeko’s lips as
she caresses them with lipstick, but the eroticism of the image is belied by
her cynical voiceover: “I’m always exhausted after an operation, but cannot
sleep. My nerves are raw. I’m on edge. I get up and go out into the streets and
hunt for easy pickups. I find them. They’re pathetically easy to lure.â€
Madame O is filled with such frissons, including the
abortion sequence, which throbs with grindhouse intensity; and an eye-popping
scene in which Saeko dispatches of a blackmailer’s corpse while clad only in
polka dot bra and panties. Despite such suggestive visuals, Fukuda for the most
part maintains a detached, non-judgmental tone. At times, the film has an
almost documentary-like quality that is enhanced by its extensive use of
black-and-white cinematography. However, occasional color sequences, seemingly
inserted without narrative justification, keep the viewer off balance and
subtly mirror the characters’ discordant emotional states.
Michiko Sakyo (also known as Michiko Aoyama) brings a
studied calm and indomitable resolve to her characterization of Saeko, while
hinting at the mental cracks in her façade. She also possesses the requisite
physical characteristics of a sex film star, and seems comfortable letting it
all hang out in the numerous but relatively restrained sex scenes that punctuate
the narrative. Akihiko Kaminara is effectively creepy as her enigmatic husband,
his face a mask of repressed greed and lust; while Yuichi Minato excels as the
sleaze ball who meets a grisly fate when he tries to play extortion games with
the deadly doctor. An added bonus is the presence of Roman Porno legend Naomi
Tani as a voluptuous minx whose treacherous impulses fit right into the moral
cesspool of voyeurism, adultery and murder.
Like the rest of Fukuda’s output, this perverse gem might
also have been consigned to the waste bin of history if not for Radley
Metzger’s Audubon Films, which distributed an English-language version of Madame
O in the late 1960s and had the foresight to preserve what is the only
remaining copy in existence. Exploitation connoisseurs can also thank Synapse
Films for bringing the film to DVD in a pristine widescreen transfer that does
full justice to Fukuda’s delirious vision. Madame O is a fitting
testament to this unsung craftsman, one who infused Japanese genre cinema with
a uniquely compelling blend of moral complexity and unbridled eroticism.
[Check out www.synapse-films.com
for more transgressive cult classics on DVD.]