Ai no mukidashi

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.

This was part of Film 4's recent 'Extreme Season' and it's easy to see why. Film critic and introducer to the film, Mark Kermode unravelled a whole heap of adjectives in trying to describe its virtues - and I think he only scraped the surface.

Yes, we know by now that it's 4 hours long but with the requisite ad breaks, that bumps it up to five. Thus, the very thought of committing the time and effort to this huge chunk of one's valuable life is far worse than actually watching it. Due to other commitments, I had to undertake watching the recording in 3 manageable pieces, turning each into 'normal' film lengths.

Lurching between high melodrama and lamenting ballad, Love Exposure IS a love story. But the most crazy, beautiful and fantastical one you've ever seen. Typically Japanese in going to extremes, at times modern fairytale and then extreme graphic violence almost at the turn of a hat.

Somehow, strangely all the characters are endearing, especially the two central ones, Yu and Yoko. Yoko must have the sweetest smile I've ever seen, at times enticing, at others crying painfully. If you think though that this is just about emotional roller-coasting, there are some of the most striking story lines and stunts and ideas that have come from a fertile, imaginative and superb director, that mix martial arts with technology, religion with sex, perversion with love and much more.

The choice of music, from Ravel's 'Bolero' to other brilliant rock pieces, that were repeated in loops really added to the structure and my enjoyment and I'm sure they hypnotised us into feeling the film shorter than it actually was. This was one of the best features of the project.

Unlike the film, I'm going to keep my review shortish. Let's just say that the hype is real, the movie is unforgettable and whilst not quite a Citizen Kane, most film lovers with an open mind and an open heart will find much to enjoy.

This is a four hour film from Sion Sono, who has directed "Suicide Club" and "Exte", amongst other films. He certainly is a maverick and this film continues to cement his reputation. The film is about the young Yu, played excellently by Takahiro Nishijima, whose father became a Catholic priest after his mom dies. The story more or less tells his life for one year starting with age 17. He falls in with a ragtag group of petty thieves, thus discovering sin. What we then find out is he is a master of the upskirt camera shot. You watch as he does martial arts moves to get the pictures. This garnered the loudest laughs from the sell out crowd at the Japan Society in New York where I saw the premiere. He then meets the rough around the edges but very pretty Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima) and also the somewhat creepy Sakura Ando, whose character tries to lure Yu and his family (which soon includes Yoko, whose guardian is dating Yu's priest dad) to a religious cult. Yoko means everything to Yu, so he tries to stop this. This film can be vulgar at times (you see copious amounts of upskirt shots) and it also to a point bashes Catholicism, but its also pretty powerful. The movie is not boring, despite its length. Its best watched in a theater, since the reaction from the audience at the premiere I went to enhanced the enjoyment. The only reason I didn't give it a 10 was because of its sometime vulgarity, but I highly recommend this film. Sion Sono is very impressive and this is a worthy addition to his controversial but always intriguing career.

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 movie is perfection. Normally, even when I enjoy a movie, I'm ready for it to be over after about two and a half hours... I'm sure there is some psychological reason for this. Suffice it to say that this was not at all the case with this movie; in the almost four hour running time, there was literally only one five minute stretch where the pace slowed down. The remainder of the film is pure electricity, and touched on every emotion you could want in a movie... there's laughter in spades, there's action aplenty, and I challenge anyone not to tear up at the amazing ending. If you see only one movie about up-skirt panty-shot taking ninjas this year, make it this one.