The Ashcan

Reeling: Love Exposure

Posted on 13. Jul, 2010 by Simon in Film, Reeling

How many movies have you seen about a dude who has to save his family from being indoctrinated into a Scientology/Branch Davidian like cult? Particularly the type of film where “saving a family” means infiltrating the cult’s ranks then going Kill-Bill samurai sword blood and guts galore on the cult leader, guards, denizens and arch-enemy who kidnapped the dude’s family in the first place using an intricate master plan?

Not many? Pity.

Ok, well how many movies have you seen about professional panty photographers who train in classical kung-fu, only to use their fighting prowess for the purpose of creating pornographic upskirt photo DVDS?

Whaaat? None? Get out.

Well, surely you’ve seen a movie where a pure catholic priest’s son has never had an erection and does not until he finds the girl of his dreams, only to have that girl’s mom eventually marry his dad and become his stepsister who sleeps in the room next to him leaving him with a perpetually rigid external symbol of his manifest romantic destiny. Oh, and to complicate matters, the stepsister-girl-of-his-dreams thinks she’s a lesbian.

Shutup. Never? For realsies?

Fine. Well, what if I told you you could see all these wonderful plot lines in one movie?

Curious you say? Well, I’m not surprised.

Better still, what if I told you this one magical movie was four-hours long and entirely in Japanese?

Is that something you would be interested in?

Well, it should be.

The movie is called Love Exposure — and it’s glorious.

Listen, you could bore yourself with plot details and summaries of how all the aforementioned storylines in Love Exposure pan out. That would take too many words however, and frankly wouldn’t convey exactly what makes writer/directer Sion Sono’s 2008 festival darling such a unique film.

Love Exposure is a four-hour art house reel. It is the type of avant garde cinema that challenges notions about religion, love, family, sexuality and coming of age. Like most art house films, half of the time you watch Love Exposure you are simply wondering what the hell is going on. And trust me, it has nothing to do with it being in Japanese. The ideas explored are some truly existential, anthropologically symbolic, genuinely confusing shit.

Yet thanks to its epic run-time, Exposure tackles none of its topics superficially. The film devotes its sprawl to meticulously developing a surprisingly small cast of characters and drawing together unfathomably disparate themes and dissonant tones into what ultimately becomes a singular journey. But good grief what a journey it is.

Surely, Sono’s greatest accomplishment with Love Exposure is not that he successfully made a four-hour film (the original cut is a Cameronesque six hours long), but rather that he made a four-hour film with extremely limited special effects and budget that feels only half that length. The sheer amount of ideas, creativity, character development, plot, comedy, mystery, intrigue and sexuality that you need to keep someone enthralled for four hours is mind boggling once you remove the help of CGI eye candy and hour long fights scenes that similar length movies might have.

Despite being in Japanese, Love Exposure never suffers for being a dialogue driven film. Forays into religion, sex, Japanese culture and family are equal parts slapstick comedy with heaping orders of of subversiveness and controversy. Indeed, as much as Sono considers himself an auteur, Love Exposure also manages to pull off light-hearted entertainment as well as any Judd Apatow production when it so requires.

The experience of watching Love Exposure isn’t really like watching a movie at all. It’s more like reading an incredibly intelligent graphic novel, where the sun is rising and you’ve stayed up ungodly hours because you just can’t stop flipping pages. Time doesn’t matter as much as exploring the world and characters. This is an incredible accomplishment for any film maker — least yet a wierdo poet from Japan.

Released in 2008 to critical acclaim, Love Exposure is available pretty much anywhere you can procure Japanese movies, both online and in person. You might have to set aside an entire day, or even break the viewing up into two session. You should do it though, if only to see what a whole lot of creativity can look like when unshackled by conventional thinking.

Tags: Four hour films, Japanese, Lesbian Japanese Schoolgirls, Sion Sono, These tags are going to attract all the wrong visitors, Upskirt photos