Film: Love Exposure
Release date: 25th January 2010
Certificate: 18
Running time: 237 mins
Director: Sion Sono
Starring: Takahiro Nishijima, Atsuro Watabe, Sakura Ando, Hikari Mitsushima, Yutaka Shimizu
Genre: Action/Comedy/Crime/Drama/Romance
Studio: Third Window
Format: DVD
Country: Japan
Alfred Hitchcock once quipped, “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder,” and, valid though his point is, it comes to us from an age before the DVD. Watching Shion Sono’s Love Exposure, at a negligible three minutes short of four hours in length, the ability to pause without missing a scene is to be appreciated. The almost incredible length of the Japanese director’s sixth feature-length film to get worldwide release (previous outings include the celebrated Suicide Club) is not the only perplexing characteristic of a film which landed fourteen awards on the international festival circuit. A tangle of techniques unfolds a convoluted narrative inhabited by unorthodox characters, and the effect is nothing if not original.
The story brings together several plot lines and characters focussed around 17-year-old Yu Honda (Takahiro Nishijima).
Following the death of Yu’s mother at the beginning of the film, his devout Catholic father, Tetsu, played by Atsuro Watabe, decides to join the ministry. Shortly after, tempted and quickly jilted by a capricious woman, the gentle priest begins to punish his son for his own loss by demanding Yu’s daily confession.
A well-behaved Catholic boy, Yu goes out in search of sins to commit in order to satisfy the vicarious desires of his father. Requiring sins of a suitable depravity, Yu becomes a master of up-skirt photography on unsuspecting passers-by. One girl, Aya Koike (Sakura Ando), catches Yu, despite his talent for panty-peeking espionage, and takes an interest in him and his work. The diabolical leader of a Christian cult, Aya hatches a plan to ruin Yu and convert his family to the Zero Church…
This exploration of voyeuristic perversion and the strictures of a minority religion (less than one percent of the Japanese population practice Christianity) is ambiguous in terms of genre. The plot is as farcical as it sounds, and a sexual humour pervades. However, often with a sardonic edge to the dark subject matter, and scenes of touching sensitivity, Love Exposure is far from a lightweight comedy.
Yu’s voyeurism is, at first, nothing more than teenage lust (fairly) innocently misdirected. However, in Sono’s hands, it turns to a critique of the dichotomy of sexual repression and open objectification of women in Japanese culture, and takes a blatant Oedipal approach to Yu’s dead mother via sexualising the image of the Virgin Mary.
Indeed, sexual taboos, that in a sombre, hard-hitting drama might take centre stage, are in plentiful supply in Love Exposure, yet never succumb to a dark eroticism. From incest to genital mutilation, every hidden act is individually painted with broad and often humorous, brush strokes, which in the grand panorama of this lengthy film paint a picture of a society with complex sex issues.
As a consequence of the length of the film, and quantity of plot points this intricate thematic exploration creates, characters do not develop through a traditional narrative arc. Sympathies for Yu, his father and his lover Kaori (Makiko Watanabe), Aya and the object of Yu’s affection and lust Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima), are not so much divided as constantly flipped as a result.
Nishijima’s performance flits between brilliantly choreographed slapstick and an emotional sensitivity, which lends his character the believability necessary to elevate this film above a bizarre comic experiment. Yu’s endeavours are both fun and foolish, and the audience wants him to be caught and to fail only to be then hurt by his failures, and support his struggle for liberation.
Ando's sadistic cult leader Koike is a brilliant comic-book villain, combining menace and allure in her tyrannical smile. Yet, her brief back story reveals a troubled and complex psychology, which makes her character and where she could take us much more than that.
Ghosts and fantasies haunt the periphery of every character, and love-interest Yoko is no exception. A girl who left her abusive womanising father, to tag along with the return of the flighty Kaori into the lives of Yu and Tetsu, is the owner of the only pair of panties to give Yu his longed for erection. Shortly after this feat, she falls in love with Yu’s female alter ego Miss Scorpion before joining the Zero Church with the zeal of a convert. Still, she may well be the least interesting of the film's band of misfits.
Tetsu is never fully explored but Watabe's subtle performance in his limited screen time consistently maintains the tragic loss of the opening throughout. His gentle priest in search of love through his son, God and Kaori is ordinary in comparison to much of the film, serving to anchor the meandering distractions in an accessible sadness.
Love Exposure is idiosyncratically Japanese, right down to the J-Pop soundtrack and off-beat comic set-pieces, but with a self-awareness to pastiche Japanese popular culture, or, more accurately, Western perceptions of it. For example, Yu learns the art of taking dirty pictures from a wise old master in a montage of martial art-style training, and all the teenage central characters have an inexplicable talent for karate that allows them to fight off scores of bad guy goons with ease. There is also the occasional nod to the traditions of Japanese cinema from the overblown blood spattering of ‘70s samurai movies to the more modern violence of Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale.
So much is brought together in this film; influences and original ideas stitched together in a cinematic patchwork and though, like a patchwork, it may be made of so many apparently ill-fitting constituent parts it still serves its purpose as a quilt. Love Exposure has as many 'purposes' as parts, but they can be neatly contained within the blanket of satisfying entertainment. GC
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