Love Exposure

Colour, DV Cam
Japan, 2008, 237 min
Section: Another View – Tokyo FilmeX Presents

Synopsis

In movies, love traditionally awaits a character who corresponds to the norms of society. In contrast, provocative Japanese director Sion Sono takes an absurdly exaggerated four-hour plunge into a world of perversion, mania, and phantasmagoria in which Cupid’s arrows target freaks and the psychologically unstable. In a narrative interlaced with psychoanalysis and Catholic dogma, love becomes the ultimate redemption. The film treats the fine line between perversion and normal behavior, while also focusing on the hazy boundary dividing the Catholic Church from a fanatical sect. Of course, the filmmaker has not created a zealous lampoon of everything holy, but a grotesquely twisted love story in which the maladies of modern society take on bizarre forms. Stylistically, the movie evokes the affectation of Japanese animated series for teenagers, and in many aspects pays homage to the rich history of Japanese exploitation films.

About the director

Sion Sono (b. 1961, Toyokawa, Japan) gained recognition at age 17 as a poet. He later started making short 8 mm films, presenting them at Japan’s PIA independent film festival. Using the stipend he received for winning the main prize, Sono created his feature debut Bicycle Sighs (Jitensha toiki, 1990), a work screened at over dozens of international festivals. This controversial artist’s greatest success to date is the bizarre movie Suicide Club (Jisatsu saakuru, 2001). It became a domestic hit, and abroad it joined other contemporary titles in reviving film enthusiasts’ interest in Far Eastern cinema. Four years later, Sono screened a loose continuation of the film at the Karlovy Vary IFF entitled Noriko’s Dinner Table (Noriko no shokutaku, 2005).