If you are going to make a film that is 237 minutes long, you'd better have convincing reasons for asking the audience to devote time above and beyond the normal call of duty. The films that do go to this length and work have a lush canvas, period setting, an ensemble cast of complex characters, or a universal tale of family and struggle spanning generations. For better or worse, there is often some kind of existential treatise working itself out through the narrative.
What you don't have is a pastiche piece set in modern times about quirky teenagers.
Did the producers ask "Why does it have to be this long?" Isn't that a producer's job? What credible answer could there have been?
Yu (Takahiro Nishijima) is the son of a Catholic priest who embraces sin as a way to connect with his father who is having a crisis of faith. Yu clings to the belief, inadvertently instilled in him by his mother before her demise, that he should save himself for his one true love, who will be a paragon of virtue akin to Virgin Mary. This leads him to objectify all women, becoming a superhero in the art of covert panty snapping.
That is about as much psychoanalysis as the narrative can bear. The film wears its misogyny lightly, celebrating the fetishistic voyeurism of the panty-peepers by pretending to mock them. See how silly they are, it asks, while lingering on close-ups of schoolgirls with their skirts hiked up. As if to hammer the point home, the Making Of on the DVD is surprisingly candid in its portrayal of Sono's cowardly sexual bullying of Hikari Mitsushima, who plays Yoko. No doubt he was more cravenly in his approaches to Atsuro Watabe for fear of getting a bloody nose. Maybe it is further pastiche, and Sono and Mitsushima collaborated slyly in this send-up in the Making Of. If so, it simply means Mitsushima has been co-opted into Sono's woman-loathing universe.
There are some lovely moments here, delicious even. Nishijima is disarming in his eagerness to please his father, and he convinces that his quest to win Yoko's heart is genuine. Watabe is a force as usual, ably complemented by an earthy Makiko Watanabe (Kaori) as the good-time girl who wins out against God for his affections. Mitsushima also convinces when called upon to first love Yu in disguise as Sasori, reject him, tolerate him as a brother, then discover her 'love' for him as her knight in shining armour (for all its pretense at being iconoclastic, the sexual politics are incredibly unreformed here).
Great acting aside, the film has moments where you snigger rather than laugh, but they are too few and far between. Music is plastered on in a ham-fisted manner. Overlong, highly dubious in its sexual politics, this movie founders on Sono's self-indulgence. Immature otaku types and mis-informed Japanophiles will lap it up in droves.
What you don't have is a pastiche piece set in modern times about quirky teenagers.
Did the producers ask "Why does it have to be this long?" Isn't that a producer's job? What credible answer could there have been?
Yu (Takahiro Nishijima) is the son of a Catholic priest who embraces sin as a way to connect with his father who is having a crisis of faith. Yu clings to the belief, inadvertently instilled in him by his mother before her demise, that he should save himself for his one true love, who will be a paragon of virtue akin to Virgin Mary. This leads him to objectify all women, becoming a superhero in the art of covert panty snapping.
That is about as much psychoanalysis as the narrative can bear. The film wears its misogyny lightly, celebrating the fetishistic voyeurism of the panty-peepers by pretending to mock them. See how silly they are, it asks, while lingering on close-ups of schoolgirls with their skirts hiked up. As if to hammer the point home, the Making Of on the DVD is surprisingly candid in its portrayal of Sono's cowardly sexual bullying of Hikari Mitsushima, who plays Yoko. No doubt he was more cravenly in his approaches to Atsuro Watabe for fear of getting a bloody nose. Maybe it is further pastiche, and Sono and Mitsushima collaborated slyly in this send-up in the Making Of. If so, it simply means Mitsushima has been co-opted into Sono's woman-loathing universe.
There are some lovely moments here, delicious even. Nishijima is disarming in his eagerness to please his father, and he convinces that his quest to win Yoko's heart is genuine. Watabe is a force as usual, ably complemented by an earthy Makiko Watanabe (Kaori) as the good-time girl who wins out against God for his affections. Mitsushima also convinces when called upon to first love Yu in disguise as Sasori, reject him, tolerate him as a brother, then discover her 'love' for him as her knight in shining armour (for all its pretense at being iconoclastic, the sexual politics are incredibly unreformed here).
Great acting aside, the film has moments where you snigger rather than laugh, but they are too few and far between. Music is plastered on in a ham-fisted manner. Overlong, highly dubious in its sexual politics, this movie founders on Sono's self-indulgence. Immature otaku types and mis-informed Japanophiles will lap it up in droves.