With Love Exposure you need to know up front that it's four hours. If you're accepting of that fact and willing to hunker down with it in theory, you're already most of the way there, because this is one of those rare epics where it definitely does not feel like a four hour slog. Instead, Sion Sono takes us through the story of Yu Honda and his love of his young teenage life, Yoko, as if it's in homage to City of God: things move forward fast by way of the characters' narration taking us along, telling us the back-stories and then how they meet in an outrageous, fateful moment.
It's too hard to simply condense all of what Love Exposure is "about". This should not be a mark against Sion Sono, on the contrary it's a mark of a film so rich in a creative story, of characters wholly developed in their various tragic and twisted and sometimes very funny ways that it almost does a disservice to have to break everything down into simple summaries. It's a film that takes many chances as outrageous satire and sordid melodrama with its ideas and details and succeeds on nearly all of them.
It all starts with the protagonist, Yu Honda (Takahiro Nishijima) telling us in narration how he was raised: his mother died when she was very young, instilling in him and Honda's father a sense of religious purpose (the Mother Mary comes into play very early at this point, and Sono comes back to it later as a device of infatuation for Yu). After she dies, Yu's father Tetsu (Atsuro Watabe) becomes a priest, but a snafu comes with Saori (Makiko Watanabe), a very insistent and hysterical woman who practically forces Tetsu to start a relationship with her. He does, briefly, but then she leaves him for someone else, which turns Tetsu into something else: a cranky priest.
He drags now teenage Yu to confession to confess things that are very petty since he's an average kid with little in the way of troubles. But the "Father" is insistent, and so Yu takes up more "sins" such as petty theft with a gang, and this soon leads into one of the real highlights of the film, which is Yu's training and mastering of the art of taking lighting-quick pictures up teenage girl's skirts for their panties, all for the ironic "approval" of having sinned enough for the confession, with hilariously disastrous results He loses a bet with his friends and has to dress up in drag. On this exact day he has a run in with a gang of thugs looking to beat up a girl, Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima) even though, as she insists, she can take care of herself.
It's after this crazy kung-fu battle that the two lock eyes: Yu on Yoko, Yoko on what appears to be a mysterious female martial arts master, who in a moment of odd inspiration is dubbed "Miss Scorpion". It's from here, at the one hour mark, we move from Yu to Yoko's back-story, even *more* harrowing and melodramatic than Yu's, THEN this leads into another back-story for the pivotal character Koike (Sakura Ando) who has ascended by her rather evil tendencies (she castrated her father as a young girl for abuse, but this isn't even what makes her evil as we find out) in a church called ZERO, which is a cultish church looking to drag families in and brainwash them with their caste system of dehumanization.
What happens when Koike starts to infiltrate Yu and his family circle, and in particular with her known connection between Yu and Yoko, shouldn't be spoiled. If it sounds like a lot of story then it is, but never, not once, did it get boring. Oh sure, it is the story of teenagers in love, and so we get a lot of what makes teens teens: sexual frustration, angsty-tendencies (Yoko has a "I HATE MEN" policy leading to her thinking she may be a lesbian), and being "perverted" in the eyes of the church. But it's directed by Sono with plenty of energy and humor - some of this is so funny in some gross and ridiculous ways, not least of which involving a running gag with Yu's continual and hard-to-deflate arousal - moving along from point to point breathlessly.
While the humor of the church could remind one of Bunuel's cunning jabs at Catholicism, there's too much to pinpoint simply because it's got something for any real movie fan: there's over-the-top Yakuza-style violence (a climactic bloodbath is reminiscent of a Miike splatter-fest), there's harsh melodrama, there's satire stretching across the spectrum from pornography to cult-worshipers to kung-fu. And if you want some actual hardcore drama out of theater there's a show-stopping scene on a beach where Yoko breathlessly and tearfully delivers the entire excerpt from Corinthians 13 to a baffled Yu. The music selections are also phenomenal, ranging from catchy Japanese pop-rock to Beethoven's 7th symphony 2nd movement, surely one of the most dramatic pieces of music for use in a movie let alone this.
Love Exposure is crazy, inspired film-making, shot on digital video with care and acted with so much gusto to match with the breakneck speed of the mis-en-scene. You'll check your watch from time to time, but only to wonder how fast its all gone by. If you're into intelligent Japanese cinema done on a HUGE canvas, this is the place to go - that is, if and when it gets a US distributor.
It's too hard to simply condense all of what Love Exposure is "about". This should not be a mark against Sion Sono, on the contrary it's a mark of a film so rich in a creative story, of characters wholly developed in their various tragic and twisted and sometimes very funny ways that it almost does a disservice to have to break everything down into simple summaries. It's a film that takes many chances as outrageous satire and sordid melodrama with its ideas and details and succeeds on nearly all of them.
It all starts with the protagonist, Yu Honda (Takahiro Nishijima) telling us in narration how he was raised: his mother died when she was very young, instilling in him and Honda's father a sense of religious purpose (the Mother Mary comes into play very early at this point, and Sono comes back to it later as a device of infatuation for Yu). After she dies, Yu's father Tetsu (Atsuro Watabe) becomes a priest, but a snafu comes with Saori (Makiko Watanabe), a very insistent and hysterical woman who practically forces Tetsu to start a relationship with her. He does, briefly, but then she leaves him for someone else, which turns Tetsu into something else: a cranky priest.
He drags now teenage Yu to confession to confess things that are very petty since he's an average kid with little in the way of troubles. But the "Father" is insistent, and so Yu takes up more "sins" such as petty theft with a gang, and this soon leads into one of the real highlights of the film, which is Yu's training and mastering of the art of taking lighting-quick pictures up teenage girl's skirts for their panties, all for the ironic "approval" of having sinned enough for the confession, with hilariously disastrous results He loses a bet with his friends and has to dress up in drag. On this exact day he has a run in with a gang of thugs looking to beat up a girl, Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima) even though, as she insists, she can take care of herself.
It's after this crazy kung-fu battle that the two lock eyes: Yu on Yoko, Yoko on what appears to be a mysterious female martial arts master, who in a moment of odd inspiration is dubbed "Miss Scorpion". It's from here, at the one hour mark, we move from Yu to Yoko's back-story, even *more* harrowing and melodramatic than Yu's, THEN this leads into another back-story for the pivotal character Koike (Sakura Ando) who has ascended by her rather evil tendencies (she castrated her father as a young girl for abuse, but this isn't even what makes her evil as we find out) in a church called ZERO, which is a cultish church looking to drag families in and brainwash them with their caste system of dehumanization.
What happens when Koike starts to infiltrate Yu and his family circle, and in particular with her known connection between Yu and Yoko, shouldn't be spoiled. If it sounds like a lot of story then it is, but never, not once, did it get boring. Oh sure, it is the story of teenagers in love, and so we get a lot of what makes teens teens: sexual frustration, angsty-tendencies (Yoko has a "I HATE MEN" policy leading to her thinking she may be a lesbian), and being "perverted" in the eyes of the church. But it's directed by Sono with plenty of energy and humor - some of this is so funny in some gross and ridiculous ways, not least of which involving a running gag with Yu's continual and hard-to-deflate arousal - moving along from point to point breathlessly.
While the humor of the church could remind one of Bunuel's cunning jabs at Catholicism, there's too much to pinpoint simply because it's got something for any real movie fan: there's over-the-top Yakuza-style violence (a climactic bloodbath is reminiscent of a Miike splatter-fest), there's harsh melodrama, there's satire stretching across the spectrum from pornography to cult-worshipers to kung-fu. And if you want some actual hardcore drama out of theater there's a show-stopping scene on a beach where Yoko breathlessly and tearfully delivers the entire excerpt from Corinthians 13 to a baffled Yu. The music selections are also phenomenal, ranging from catchy Japanese pop-rock to Beethoven's 7th symphony 2nd movement, surely one of the most dramatic pieces of music for use in a movie let alone this.
Love Exposure is crazy, inspired film-making, shot on digital video with care and acted with so much gusto to match with the breakneck speed of the mis-en-scene. You'll check your watch from time to time, but only to wonder how fast its all gone by. If you're into intelligent Japanese cinema done on a HUGE canvas, this is the place to go - that is, if and when it gets a US distributor.