Love Exposure

Well, I'll say this: I've never seen a film like Love Exposure before, and I doubt I ever will again. Directed by Sion Sono, this Japanese film from 2008 is a true original--a four-hour film about up-skirt photography.

Of course it's much more than that. It's also about religion, parent-child relationships, and love, but the peek-a-panty stuff is what I'll remember most. Not only is Love Exposure a wildly inventive and entertaining film, it also is whacking material for guys with fetishes for panties and cute Asian girls. I don't have either, but I now have an abiding crush on an actress named Hikari Mitsumisha.

The film centers around Yu (Takahiro Nishijima). We see him as a young boy when his mother dies, and his Catholic indoctrination, as his widowed father becomes a priest. All seems good, until an unbalanced woman (Makiko Watanabe) basically throws herself at the priest. They have an illicit relationship, but when she dumps the dad, he goes off the rails, and Yu endures confessions with his father, in which he has a hard time coming up with sins. So he sins to please his father. He ends up learning the art of up-skirt photography, by using acrobatics to get the perfect shot of a girl's panties. It's all absurd, of course, but it's funny the way he learns this art as if it were some ancient Oriental mystic ritual.

Meanwhile, we learn the story of Yoko (Mitsushima) and Kioke (Sakura Ando). Both are men-hating young women. Yoko ends with Watanabe, who is one of her father's lover. Kioke is a master manipulator, recruiting for a religious cult called the Zero Church. She manages to get Yu and Yoko to meet, though at the time Yu is dressed as a woman he calls "Miss Scorpion." Confused? It's not at all confusing while watching, but over the four-hour running time there are a lot of twists and turns. It's not a standard three-act film: there must be at least seven or eight acts.

Here's the good about Love Exposure: it's audaciously brilliant at times. The use of post-modern film techniques, such as subtitles, multiple viewpoints of the same scene, and allowing for long, rule-breaking things likeYoko, in tears, reciting the whole passage of Corinthians 13 from the Bible. There's something of Quentin Tarantino in this, surely, but Sono has a unique visual style (I haven't seen any of his other films). He also makes great use of music, with three themes: Beethoven's Seventh Symphony--the second movement, with its gradual building; Ravel's "Bolero," with a different sort of building; and a surf-rock riff (that takes it more into Tarantino country).

Here's what's not great about Love Exposure: much of the acting is completely overwrought. This may be a cultural thing, as I've noticed that some Asian cinema, particularly the genre stuff, has a lot of overacting (just think of the Saturday matinee monster movies). Nishijima is a particular offender, but I have the feeling this is the director's doing, for if any actor was that amped up a director would probably put a stop to it. Also, my age-old complaint about martial arts films comes into play here--when one person takes on a dozen or so attackers, why don't the attackers act as one, instead of allowing the sole person to fight them one at a time? After thousands of years, you'd think they'd have figured out this is not good strategy.

But I liked Love Exposure a lot, even though it killed off an entire afternoon. I immediately started Googling pictures of Hikari Mitsushima.