Love Exposure

Summing up Sono's Love Exposure is a task I still do not think I am ready for even after two days of soaking it in after my viewing at NYAFF. Some of the many ideas the film dealt with in the 4 hour runtime included commentary on religion, cultism, perversion, growing up and coming of age, love, and life. The film tackles many of these heavy hitting themes and ideas with a sense of humor found very little in much of the mainstream fluff produced today. The balance of subtle often crude humor and darker, heavier, more dramatic aspects of the story really works well. Sono creates a product that can appeal to a wider base of people. There is something in this film for everyone from the people who enjoy the latest Will Ferrel production to the admirers of Bergman. With a rowdy packed house at the NY premiere at the festival the first two and a half hours are a riot and breeze by. There are points in the latter portion which start to drag a bit but never could I say I was bored with the film. The movie was well made with good cinematography, decent acting, and a great script with fully fleshed out characters. The director is able to create an effective commentary on religion, loneliness, Japanese society all the while mixing in a lot of body humor, up-skirt shots, and a few lesbian kissing scenes for good measure. Overall highly recommended, ignore the 4 hour runtime because it is the fastest 4 hour movie you will see. Ultimately a funny, sad, uplifting, and depressing movie all at the same time.

Love Exposure is Sion Sono's first truly great film. As much as I was truly creeped out and disturbed by his previous modern horror classic "Suicide Circle" I was equally bored and repulsed by his "Strange Circus", so much so I had written Sonno off as a hack who got lucky. Love Exposure continues Sono's themes of alienated youth on the fringes of cults and the extremes of pop culture, but here he gives himself the freedom to be funny, sweet, frail, absurd, and exciting.

The story begins with a catholic boy named Yu whose mother dies, but not before asking to him to swear that he will find a woman like the Virgin Mary to make his wife. His father out of grief dedicates himself to the priesthood, and all is well until a romantic "detour" in his life, leaves him a sin obsessed and emotionally vacant shell whose Jeremiah's and interrogations of his son become his only solace.

He insists Yu make daily confessions, and though Yu wants to oblige, he cant think of any wrongs he might possibly have committed, that is until he begins committing some sins of his own. His small sins are quickly not enough for his father who thinks he's just making it up and not really concerned with sin and thus his immortal soul.

It is only when he meets a group of street kids, and begins learning the secret art of up skirt panty photography (peek-a-panty), that his father reacts and beats him, finally not acting like an impartial priest but an enraged father.

This backfires a bit for Yu when his father moves out of the house completely, to live in the church and be "closer to God". This is all played out in black comedy fashion, the peek-a-panty training sequence which uses elements of kung-fu and acrobatics to capture the naughty pics, being some of the most especially funny.

Yu's incorruptibility while he performs these increasingly corrupt acts is another thing that keeps this movie from wallowing in its transgressions. Yu only wants his father to love him and really does believe his sins will please him and bring them closer together. In fact none of the characters even the film's villain, the young leader and "criminal mastermind" of the Zero Church (a Scientology/Aum inspired cult; the Aum carried out the deadly Serin gas attacks in a Tokyo subway in 1995, an event which seems central to much of Sono's work) named Koike, who strokes a small green parrot like a James Bond villain, is motivated throughout the havoc she wreaks, not by a desire for world domination, by her love for Yu.

Yu out one day in drag after losing a bet, encounters a group of inexplicable street toughs harassing a girl, who comes to resemble "his Maria" the girl he has been searching for all this time (and who he insists he will know because she will be the first to give him an erection). What ensues is a kung fu fight in town square, that ends with a sweet if confusing kiss, exchanged by the star crossed lovers.

Confusing because Yoko (his Maria), believes her first kiss was with a woman (Ms. Scorpion) and that she may now be a lesbian, which coincides nicely with her understandable "hatred of men" stemming from her abusive father. To make a four hour story short, Yu and Yoko become step brother and sister, and Yu is put in a Tootsie/Spiderman like position of having created an alter-ego the love of his life is more interested in than "the real him".

Then things heat up, dramatically and under the collar, when Koike whose been observing impassively for the first hour or so, enters the picture claiming to be Ms. Scorpion (Yu's alter ego, the spitting image of Blank Blank in Lady Prisoner), and seducing Yoko (in many a lesbian school girl make-out session) in order to get closer to Yu.

I'll stop there with plot, because there are still two and half more hours I would have to describe.

Goodness and perversion are the two twin themes throughout the film, just as I've said each character is motivated in some ways by love, but they all different definitions of what love is. These definitions are more often than not imposed by some social barrier or psychological scar from childhood.

Some may be bothered by the "weirdness", "perversity", or sacrilege in the film, but everything is in its right place, in its right measure, and nothing is exploitative. The immersion in perversion and the obscene recalls another great modern spiritual film Abel Ferrara's "Bad Lieutenant" where bodies are used and abused with drugs and degraded sex, in order to make the contrast between the spiritual and non physical more clear.

Ken Russell's The Devils and Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, both focus on the material, hostile, and outrageous, to show the pure spirit; God struggling in the world, as the spirit/mind struggles with the body. For Sono the material world is one of porn, guilt, self flagellation, but above all love. Though love may lead take on one on many a strange "detour" in life, it ultimately really does conquer all (see Corinthians 13).

For these reasons and too many more to write down, Sonos up-skirt peek-a-panty ninja quest for the Virgin Mary as Holy Grail is one of the best love stories, coming of age tales, and movies of the decade. This movie is a strange brew of the theatrical and the uncommonly sensitive, in a way that truly has to be seen for yourself. I hope when it gets released stateside it comes with its full run time intact, because it's the first four hour movie I've ever seen that I sincerely didn't want to end.

This film was recommended to me when I mentioned going to a film festival in London, so I read a little about it and it gathered that it was a four hour plus Japanese movie with themes surrounding Catholic guilt, love, up-skirt fetishism, and transvestism. How could I fail to be entertained? Well I wasn't.

A false dichotomy containing however a large helping of truth is that with cinema, when you go down either the art-house or mainstream routes, you are opting for either the morbid or the stupid (occasionally both). If that's so, then Love Exposure is an example of the troisieme voie that modern exuberant Japanese cinema can be. This film is literally bursting with life and fully sustains the four hour running time. I felt like asking the winds why all cinema wasn't like this when I came out.

Despite numerous sashays forward and back in time and a pretty complex plot, what we've got here is basically a love story between star-cross'd lovers, a young man Yu, and a young woman Yoko. The comedy aspect comes with the obstacles that Yu is continuously having to overcome to achieve love with Yoko, a girl who hates all men, except for Kurt Cobain (incidentally Cobain crossdressed). Spunky Yu is going to be dragged through bushes, over hot coals, through friendships, in and out of a cult and drug before he even gets close to Yoko.

The soundtrack is pretty crazy, and disarmingly obvious, main uses are made of Ravel's Bolero and the Allegretto from Beethoven's Symphony #7 (if you don't recognise the name you probably will recognise the sound). There's also some J-rock chucked in for added good measure, and that was not bad to be fair (I don't generally care for modern vocal music - chock full of loose allusions). The vast majority of films wouldn't get away with the classical choices made here, however the film has the level of pathos and interest to match the music.

There's quite a lot of points scored along the way about different modes of living. Tosatsu is shown as being as revelatory as the Christian experience. Tosatsu by the way, if you can believe it, is the Japanese martial art of taking up-skirt photos of unwary young women. The movie dwells a lot on the fetishism involved with Christianity as much as it does up-skirt fetishism. We quite often see ornate gold and mother of pearl rosaries being held by female characters, and the ritual of confession becomes incredibly fetishised, literally causing Yu to commit far more sin than he would otherwise have done.

It occurs to you occasionally that the film is low budget, as some of the cinematography is reminiscent more of a documentary than a high production values movie. But the movie is a pure unbroken copper strand, conducting electricity throughout. The great device of Sono during the first half of the movie is to have a countdown to a "miracle" that is going to occur so you're always in anticipation.

I've simplified the movie a bit, there are several important characters that I haven't mention whose stories play out alongside Yu's, and the level of character development is very high. This is the movie experience of the year. You'll see the hospital run at the end, and it will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Congratulations to Shion Sono, who has displayed a sensitivity to marginalised folks, and a joie de vivre that hardly anyone else is even trying to do.

For me, "Love Exposure" is something of a terrific one-off experience. How to begin to describe with any degree of rationality the extraordinary effect of bewildering excitement it has had on a near octogenarian, is a task I find daunting. And yet for a work unlike any other in its helter-skelter delivery of an adolescent's quest for romantic fulfilment ( which I suppose is what it is all about), I feel I should at least take up the challenge. With such an engagingly innocent central character as schoolboy Yu, it seems completely natural to suspend disbelief and go along with everything he experiences, including his hilarious initiation into the skills of a panty photographer, his role as father-confessor at a perverts' convention and his attack with explosives and much blood letting on the HQ of a brainwashing religious cult. Buried beneath it all there could well be many serious messages (you get a big chunk of Corinthians!) or it could be just a pile of tosh. But in the end, who cares, such is the delirious pleasure that just under four hours of outrageous goings-on have delivered. I suppose I just love the theme of innocent youngsters taking on the wicked world. Gosh! I am still reeling, my critical faculties all but shattered!

Imagine the perfect movie, and there will never be a better one after that. I saw "Love Exposure" today at the Nippon Connection Film Festival in Frankfurt. It's a masterpiece. The best 4 hours of cinema I have ever seen. It's so heartbreaking, my knees are still shaking and I have to say, I cried like a Baby at the End. Forget everything you've ever seen before and go on a ride you will never forget. Sion Sono is a goddamn genius. And the best about it, it's not a second to long. On the contrary, the movie cut is very fast. I hope Rapid Eye Movies will release a uncut DVD and Blu-ray version in Germany. It's very rare you feel those magic moments in cinema these days.

Wolfgang