Fantastic Fest 09: LOVE EXPOSURE Review

Dangerously deranged and bracingly original, Sion Sono's Love Exposure skirts brilliance -- and then blows it up, exposing a raw heart and more panties than I've ever seen in a major motion picture.

Describing Love Exposure as "the four-hour flick about an up-skirt photographer" would be willfully perverse, and just plain silly. The film itself is a galvanizing experience, the kind that leaves you feeling naked and ashamed, even as it wrings riotous humor from offensive behavior, jerks tears in behalf of reprehensible people, and calmly sallies forth with bold explorations of morality, sexuality, and spirituality.

Viewers should consider purchasing a neck brace in advance, because Love Exposure will give you whiplash, shifting moods, genres, and points of view like an out-of-control bumper car in a tiny, dark closet.

The perversion and the panties -- and the 4-hour running time, and the rapturous reviews -- put the film on the map even before it was officially released in Japan last January. The intervening months have stirred many reactions, including three different views contributed to ScreenAnarchy in connection with its screenings at the New York Asian Film Festival and Montreal's Fantasia. Love Exposure stirs so many emotions, however, that even if you've read every review in the world, you'll want to express yourself after you've seen it. And, to be honest, I think it's best to approach the film cold; I did nothing more than skim two or three reviews ahead of time, and feel that contributed to my reaction.

So, yes, I'm writing a review that I'm suggesting that you stop reading, which may be perverse in its own way yet is also quite fitting. Instead, let me sketch out a few thoughts based on filmmaker Sion Sono, and then describe a few striking moments in no particular order, and then provide a sense of why the film is so good.

Love Exposure showed me several things I'd never seen before -- my absolute favorite was a spellbinding quotation by the sea -- along with a handful of other images -- some disgusting, some disturbing -- that I wish I'd never seen.

Remember the opening sequence of Sono's Suicide Club? The groups of Japanese schoolgirls lined up on a subway platform, and the excited chattering, and the approaching train, and the leap into space, and the blood, oh, mother, all the blood? The outrageous "oh, no, they won't" followed by the disbelieving "oh, no, they didn't," followed by "oh, no, why am I laughing?" That pretty much describes one disturbing, over the top, blood-soaked sequence in Love Exposure.

But it also describes a deliriously funny extended training sequence in which our hero Yu (Takahiro Nishijima) strikes a series of formal, graceful, athletic poses that would gladden the heart of any martial arts master -- except that Yu is learning how to become the world's finest upskirt photographer.

It also describes the lengthy opening sequence, as heartbreaking and sincere and dramatic and poignant as any family drama in recent years.

And many more sequences that consider the implications of faith in the modern world, religion vs. reality, the hurtling rock of hypocrisy that spiritual leaders sometimes hurl, the debilitating damage of unrelieved guilt, the mysterious communications chasm that too often develops between parents and their children, the shallow costume of bullies who don't know what they want, and the sheer joy and complete embarrassment of inappropriate public erections.

And how much fun it is for boys to dress up like girls, and for girls to realize they don't have to settle for boys, and the dead, yet piercing eyes of someone whose soul has long ago departed for a better place.

And the amazing, incredible performances, notably Hikari Mitsushima as Yoko, for my money the most gut-wrenching of them all.

So, yes, I'm writing a review that I don't know how to write about a movie that I don't quite understand but can't get out of my mind. And I don't even think I can recommend that you seek it out, because it might, possibly, damage you in ways that I cannot completely comprehend.

Beware.