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‘Love Exposure’: The sprawling Japanese cult film masterpiece that you must see before you die
01.07.2020
09:36 am
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It’s too bad words like ‘masterpiece’ and ‘epic’ have been so overused by excitable film critics, because Sion Sono’s Love Exposure is an actual epic masterpiece that is going to dominate the filmscape for decades.” - New York Asian Film Festival

“Japan’s eroto-theosophical answer to the allegorical journeys of Alejandro Jodorowsky”—Film Four

Japanese auteur Sion Sono’s extraordinary 2008 film Love Exposure (“Ai no mukidashi”) is the epic—yet still whimsical—story of Yu Honda (Takahiro Nishijima), the “king of the perverts.” Yu is the ninja master of the “up skirt” photograph. After his mother dies, Yu’s father becomes a Catholic priest. He insists that his son confess his sins to him. Yu, a good boy, has nothing really to confess so he just makes stuff up that his father doesn’t even believe. Eventually he falls in with a new crowd and soon his transgressions are a bit more… sinful. Still, Yu himself is not aroused by his own panty shots and lives an otherwise chaste life as he patiently awaits the arrival of his one true love. He’s only “sinning” for the sake of his relationship with his father.

Yu loses a bet and he is obliged to dress as a woman and kiss a girl he likes. As the boys are goofing off, they come across a young girl, Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima), who is about to be attacked by a gang. Yu is instantly smitten with the beautiful Yoko and—still dressed as a woman—he jumps into the fight and together they kick the gang’s collective ass. To fulfill the conditions of the bet, Yu kisses Yoko who begins to think she is a lesbian and crushes hard on Yu’s disguise of “Miss Scorpion” (an obvious nod to the 70s Japanese women in prison Female Convict Scorpion film series) Yu believes he has finally met his one true love… and she thinks he’s a woman!
 

 
Yu then finds out that his father the priest has a new girlfriend and will be leaving the priesthood to marry her. Guess who his new step sister is going to be?

The entire first hour of the film—the title card appears 58 minutes in—is but a prologue, setting up what’s to come. The Aum Shinrikyo-like cult religion, the gory violence and the explosions all happen later…It’s a pretty epic love story as far as they go. Trust me, you have never seen THIS film before (or anything else even remotely like it). But you really need to.

I’d recommend Sono’s loopy masterpiece (and it is a masterpiece) to anyone with a taste for unusual world cinema, which is not to say it’s esoteric in any way, because it’s not. Love Exposure is a real crowd pleaser. It’s an event! It may run for four hours, true, but it felt like two, trust me, don’t be intimidated by the length. Even if someone doesn’t love it as much as I do, surely they would appreciate it. It’s such an unusual cinematic experience. And it’s great fun. When it was over, I was sad there wasn’t more. When’s the last time you felt that way about a four hour film? Feel that way about Ben Hur or The Irishman?
 

A trailer for Sino Sono’s ‘Love Exposure’ with English subtitles. I can’t say that it’s successful at getting the film’s point across, but that would just be impossible.

It didn’t take but a minute after the film had ended for me to jump online and try to buy the film’s soundtrack. It doesn’t exist as such, but aside from a bit of Beethoven’s “Symphony No.7 in A Major” and Ravel’s “Bolero” the entire four hour film’s soundtrack consists of three amazing songs by the long running Japanese psych rock band Yura Yura Teikoku (“The Wobbling Empire”). These same three songs are played over and over and over again. After four hours, they are drilled into your DNA for life.

Although I personally had never heard of them before, Yura Yura Teikoku were around from 1989 to 2010. They are one of the very few “underground” groups in Japan ever to become a major commercial act. They almost never played outside of Japan, and were, and still are, criminally obscure outside of their homeland. I’ll try to describe their sound, but it’s sort of pointless as Yura Yura Teikoku cover so much territory from song to song. They’re intense, but they’re melodic. At times the trio—who describe their own music simply as “psychedelic rock”—sound like Can crossed with Phish. Or early Flaming Lips doing a spaghetti western theme. Other times they remind me of a 60s garage rock band like The Sonics, but the next song will sound like Lloyd Cole. The one after that sounds like the lovechild of Neu! and the Grateful Dead. Or even the Ventures channeled through Ennio Morricone or a combination of Pink Floyd with The Blow Monkeys! Suffice to say, they are all over the map musically, from heavier riff-based guitar rock to prettier tunes that would make a great soundtrack for a picnic on a sunny day. From hard-rock workouts that will crush your head to things that you would whistle along with. Black Sabbath to Burt Bacharach on the same album, if not the same song.

The one area of commonality that nearly ALL of Yura Yura Teikoku’s music has—trust me, because I’ve been positively gorging myself on it lately—is that their songs posses a quality that make them sound uncannily familiar. The three songs featured so prominently in Love Exposure are especially adept earworms.  Have a listen to my new favorite band, Yura Yura Teikoku. Chances are that they might become your new favorite new band, too.
 

“Kudo desu (Hollow Me)”
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.07.2020
09:36 am
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‘Love Exposure’: Sion Sono’s mindbender gets an American theatrical release
09.04.2011
05:39 pm
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Sion Sono and the 400 page script for Love Exposure.
 
I’d like to add my voice to the chorus of praise for Sion Sono’s (Suicide Club, Cold Fish) epically weird and wonderful Love Exposure.

Three minutes short of four hours long, Sono’s metaphysical black comedy is never boring and completely unlike any film you’re likely to see now or in the near future. Imagine a diabolically funny mix of John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, John Hughes and David Lynch and you might get a sense of what Sono is up to in Love Exposure. Gory, romantic, spiritual and completely bonkers, this is a trip definitely worth taking. Somehow Sono (a poet turned film maker) performs the magic act of juggling what seems like a dozen film genres in the air with supernatural grace.

I dig film critic Simon Abrams’ take on the movie:

Love Exposure is, in a sense, Sono’s equivalent of the Great Russian novel. In it, his substantial disaffection for societal conventions is matched only by his monumental love for his spectacularly messed-up protagonists. These characters become deranged because they have to create their own belief system. There’s no God except for the ones that Yôko, Aya Koike (Sakura Andô), and Yû Honda (Takahiro Nishijima) make for themselves. God is represented by mundane authority figures, people who simultaneously project their own fear of loving someone else and lustful need to be loved. In other words, father/Father figures are all rotten to the core in Love Exposure, though they’re all rotten in unique ways.

Made in 2008, Love Exposure is finally receiving a limited American theatrical run two years after I first encountered it at Austin’s Fantastic Fest.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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09.04.2011
05:39 pm
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Cold Fish: Sion Sono film festival at Cinefamily
06.09.2011
02:20 pm
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I’ve been raving about the work of Japanese film director Sion Sono for a few days here on the blog. This weekend at Cinefamily in Los Angeles, several of Sono’s films will be shown and there will either be an introduction or else a post-film Q&A with the director. Friday night there will be a special free screening of Sono’s latest film, Cold Fish:

Right from its sucker-punch opening with its jagged hand written titles and razor editing, Sion Sono’s Cold Fish grabs you by the hair and drags you through an intense narrative of betrayal, infidelity and murder. Ostensibly inspired by the story of a real-life Japanese serial killer (who raised dogs, rather than fish), Cold Fish has all of Sono’s trademark brilliance and nihilism in its tale of sad-sack Shamoto (Mitsuru Fukikoshi), who’s stuck with a failing fish store and a family who hates him. When Shamoto meets the the charismatic and rich Murata, owner of a popular high-end fish shop and a hot-red Ferrari (Denden, in one of the greatest serial killer portrayals of the last few decades), his life changes irrevocably. Easily manipulated and coerced into progressively worse situations, it’s not long before Shamoto realizes that not only has Murata car-jacked his life, but he’s also shut the windows, locked the doors and is driving them full-speed off of a cliff.

Series co-presented by Giant Robot and Bloody-Disgusting
 

 
Watch the trailer for Cold Fish blow. Register for free tickets to the screening here.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.09.2011
02:20 pm
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