LOVE EXPOSURE: Another Take

[Our thanks to Greg Christie for the following.]

This may possibly be one of the most difficult films a person could possibly sit down and write about or review. If you’re a regular here at ScreenAnarchy, chances are you’re already familiar with Sono’s previous work and all of the hype surrounding his current opus. So I’m going to avoid redundancies and refrain from providing any basic synopsis. I’m also going to keep this review as spoiler free as possible. This is simply one person’s emotional reaction to what they’ve witnessed. I’ll leave the major plot spoilers for the talkback below.

Like all of you, I’ve been reading and hearing heaps of praise and a generous amount lot of hyperbole for Love Exposure as it’s been making its rounds on the festival market. I’m a long time fan of Sono, having seen the North American premiere of Suicide Club at the Philadelphia International Film Festival back in the spring of 2002. To this day, I still find Noriko’s Dinner Table to be Sono’s strongest work and one of the most powerful Japanese films made in the last decade. But I was also absolutely horrified by Strange Circus and found that to be one of the single most disgusting films I’ve ever seen. So I went into Love Exposure extremely excited, but not without some trepidation.

It’s impossible to discuss Love Exposure without bringing up its running time. I’m sure the first thing that anyone who hasn’t seen the film is wondering is, “is four hours too long?” That’s a complicated question actually, but the short answer is. Yes…Hell yes. And I’d be cautious to believe anyone who says otherwise.

Love Exposure is a lot of things, but the one thing that it is not, is boring. The film’s plot and characters careen from one twist to another, the tone and structure constantly changing gears, often violently (literally). It’s a roller coaster ride form beginning to end. Sounds like a good thing right? I suggest you think about that a little more. A four hour roller coaster ride? Might that not get a bit tiring or exhaustive?

By no means is the film insufferable, I never felt restless during the running time. But a little after hour three my mind began to wander. The film lacks any real focus, and as a result, I lost mine a third way through. By the end, I really didn’t care if Yu, the film’s protagonist, would end up with Yoko, his Maid Marian.

Ultimately, Love Exposure is a romance at heart. Yu’s obsession with Yoko is the driving force behind much of the film. Both characters are interesting and well performed, but they have zero chemistry as a couple. Apart from Yu’s silly quest to find his Mary, there’s absolutely no reason for him to be in love with Yoko, and until the final few moments, they shared absolutely no time together that would suggest they’d have any reason to be in love with each other. It’s all very shallow, surprisingly so for a film that has four hours to spend developing their relationship.

But there is a lot to like with the film, probably enough that most are going to convince themselves that the film is a success as a whole. There are moments of absolute brilliance, and a few laugh out loud funny moments. The first hour is a powerhouse tour de force of slapstick, nihilistic Japanese comedy.

Before the film, NYAFF programmer, Mark Walkow asked the audience to check their watches when the film’s title card appeared. When the kanji for Love Exposure finally hit the screen, a full sixty minutes had already passed; the audience had gone into an uproar. Unfortunately, the ecstatic energy of the crowed waned as the film continued. If Sono goes back and cuts an hour and some change out, I think he’d have something very fun and special on his hands. And I believe that there’s at least an hour of fat the film could stand to lose.

During the QA, there was a woman who asked Sono why he didn’t cut more. She told him she found much of the film repetitive. You could hear the audience collectively gasp in horror at her comment. Yet, everyone I spoke to during the reception admitted they found it at least 40 minutes too long and agreed that much of the film was very silly.

In many ways, Love Exposure is the quintenssential contemporary independent Japanese film. It contains all of the elements of extreme Asian cinema that ScreenAnarchy readers adore. It’s a variable grab bag with winks and nods to classic Japanese Exploitation cinema, pink films, saccharine romance, and slapstick comedy. Many of the films flaws are actually endearing for the first two hours or so. The film plays out like a cinematic punk song. Fast, frantic, intense, raw, and very very sloppy. Sono is throwing everything and the kitchen sink out the window, unfortunately, a lot of it doesn’t work. And as far as I could tell, it didn’t work for a lot of people who attended Friday’s screening.

In summary, the film is about Catholicism, cults, love, peek a panty photography etc but it has very little to say about pornography and sex, and what points it does make about the nature of religion and cults, it later contradicts. It feels like Sono is making it all up as he’s going along with no actually plan or overreaching character arches, and the farther he takes things, the more obvious it is that even he’s forgetting what came before.

When it comes to sex, the film is surprisingly chaste. While there’s a plethora of panty shots and camel toes abound, there is no nudity or on screen sex. The irony that Yu and Yoko’s relationship ends on a platonic note is sweet and clever. Still, for a film about the king of hentai, it’s all very restrained, frustratingly so. Well, that is, apart from an incredibly graphic and absolutely gratuitous castration.

And there in lies the film’s biggest problem. So much of the film is just juvenile. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it prevented the film from being the ultimate masterpiece for me that others have been proclaiming it to be.

Love Exposure is a film that I would absolutely recommend to fans of Sion Sono and extreme Japanese cinema, but no one else. Noriko’s Dinner Table, on the other hand, was a film I felt confident showing to general audiences and lending out to casual friends uninitiated with Japanese cinema whereas Love Exposure is an otaku’s wet dream.

We’re given the back-story of one character with a longstanding history of physical abuse which ends with her strangling her father, rubbing her crouch on his hard on, and then cutting it off, releasing a geyser of blood that paints the entire bed room red. Yeah, did I forget to mention that Yoshihiro Nishimura of Tokyo Gore Police fame did the effects? This same character also kills a shitload of her peers at her high school. But she doesn’t go to jail or anything. There seems to be very little consequences to anyone’s actions. People maim, murder, and blow up buildings with no reprehensions. The film is so loopy and filled with so many holes in its plot, it’s almost impossible to follow.

The film poses a lot of questions and leaves almost all of them unanswered and often completely unexplored. Many could claim the same about Suicide Club or Noriko’s Dinner Table but I’d disagree. As extreme and surreal as both of those films were, The worlds that Sono created within those films had a basic, primary logic. The themes and ideas within those films are very concrete and comprehensible. For me, Love Exposure is just a bunch of crazy. It’s everything that most people thought Suicide Club was.

Sure, a lot of Love Exposure concerns itself with Catholicism and cults. But it’s all very shallow. It attacks Christianity based solely on surface values and feels a bit uninformed.

A large, corporate cult called Church Zero plays also very large role in Love Exposure, yet the audience is never really told or shown what it is that the cult stands for. We’re told that they’re bad and that they kidnap people’s families and brainwash them, but we’re never told why, to what gain. I was expecting a Jonestown type massacre or grand political conspiracy by the end. What does happen is a bit anti climatic and completely confusing.

There is a brilliant and dizzying foot chase through the cult’s sky rise premises revealing rooms of cult members being brainwashed, doped up, and caged, and it’s probably the most interesting scene in the film. But again, we never go back to that, nothing is further explained about the cult. I’m not asking for exposition or to be patronized, but if a director is going to ask for four hours of my time, I want some depth.

Norkio’s Dinner Table is a significantly more poignant film that deals with similar themes. It’s a far more powerful and emotionally engaging exploration of personal identity and one woman’s misanthropic quest to destroy as many people as possible.

As far as I could tell, the audience was decidedly mixed Friday night. In fact, a few people around me were absolutely furious at the picture. My initial reaction was, “I don’t know.” My three friends’ reactions were “I don’t know.”

Three days later and I still don’t know how I feel about the film. In many ways, it felt like it was all a dream. I can remember the experience as a whole, but the details are already fuzzy. There is a certain indescribable quality to the film that seems to wash over the audience and induces a slight type of hypnosis.

Seeing Love Exposure on the big screen with an audience is certainly an experience, and one that I’m glad that I had. But I can honestly say I’ll never see this in its entirety again.

Review by Greg Christie