Love Exposure (2008) - 4/4

Love Exposure is the cinematic equivalent of post-post-modern novels like Infinite Jest and White Teeth, or the novels of Murakami: big, ambitious, sprawling, yet with an emotional core and focus. To some extent, Love Exposure is even more successful than its literary correlates. It is an epic four hour romantic tragicomedy on the themes of love and perversion told with such a sure hand and masterful pacing that it manages to mostly redeem itself of its shortcomings.

Those shortcomings develop in the first act, within which the influence of post-modern literature is most evident. During the first hour of the film, I couldn't help but think of James Wood's criticism of White Teeth and similar novels of the style he labels 'hysterical realism.' As he put it, "An excess of storytelling has become the contemporary way of shrouding, in majesty, a lack; it is the Sun King principle. That lack is the human." Within the first hour, Sono has a quasi-religious School of Upskirt Photography with its own sacred writings and martial arts techniques; a teenage boy who sins to please his dad, a Catholic priest, in confession, and can only get an erection if he finds a girl who reminds him of the Virgin Mary; this boy becomes the King of the Upskirt Photographers and gains his own disciples. This is very entertaining, but too zany, too eager to please with "showy liveliness" that hangs off the characters "like jewelry." It is not the lack of plausibility that is difficult to handle, but the lack of human emotion and relationship in these conceptual rather than emotional connections.

With the second hour, Sono begins to truly redeem his narrative. With all the elements in place from the first hour, with the characters and their histories established, he begins to delve into real human emotion. The story is surprisingly simple in its outline: a Catholic priest and his son, Yu, are both 'perverts,' the priest for having had relations with a woman while a priest and Yu for being an upskirt photographer. Koike, a female regional director for a fast-growing cult, the Church of Zero, is a puritanical sociopath who becomes obsessed with Yu and so concocts a plan to convert Yu's Catholic family as an example to others that the Church of Zero is the religion to join. The love of Yu's life, Yoko, who is the adopted daughter of the woman Yu's father is marrying, becomes the means by which Koike will dominate the family. While the damage has been done, to an extent, by the first hour, by making the connections between many of the characters so fragile, based on the mere use of the phrase 'original sin,' or on one character accidentally appearing like the Virgin Mary, the remaining three hours focus entirely on the emotions and relationships of these characters. Yu's unrequited love for Yoko and the machinations of Koike, as well as a subplot involving the Catholich Church's refusal to allow a priest to marry, give Love Exposure a very solid emotional core.

Despite the shortcomings I point out above, Sono is overwhelmingly successful with Love Exposure. Every human is different, has a distinct psychology that comes from a unique upbringing and set of experiences; how the quest for love and how love itself are expressed in each person will differ. Somewhere along the way, ideologies like Christianity restricted the ways in which love could be sought or expressed and all alternatives are labeled 'perverse.' Sono examines the category of the 'perverse,' but doesn't try to argue with the label. Rather he argues for its being embraced. What Sono contrasts to love is not perversion, but guilt; and guilt is what homogenization imposes on those deemed 'perverts.' Yu is unabashedly a pervert, embracing the category explicitly. But he's a pervert out of love: love for his mother who tells him to find a girl like the Virgin Mary; love for his father who is only fatherly when Yu confesses obscene sins; love for Yoko who prefers him in drag. So is Yu's father, a priest who wants to get married, a pervert out of love. The enemies are those who want to abolish perversion with guilt: Koike and the Church of Zero who want to crush Yu, the Catholic Church that won't allow Yu's father to marry.

Having only seen Sono's one earlier work Suicide Club, I am astonished by how much he has grown as an artist. While he was very good to begin with, Love Exposure is an outstanding achievement as both entertainment and art. Any who watch it will be engrossed and the four hours will just flitter away; and any who watch it will come away wiser, as I believe I have. It's a film that won't leave my mind for a very long while.

Endnotes
1. James Wood, "Human, All Too Inhuman," The New Republic Online (August 30, 2001). http://www.powells.com/review/2001_08_30.html