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Title: Love Exposure

Country: Japan (2008)

Genre: ?

Director: Shion Sono

Cast: Takahiro Nishijima, Hikari Mitsumisha, Sakura Andô

Plot

Yu (Takahiro Nishijima) is the perfect son who does nothing wrong. Since the death of his wife, his father works as a priest. He gets along very good with his son unless he has a short relationship with the wild Kaori. After the breakup everything changes. As his father gets more and more embittered he becomes fanatic and forces his son repeatedly to confess. As Yu has no sins to confess he starts committing sins in order to satisfy his father. One day he meets a group of juveniles. Together they are trained by a weird master in the art of photographing under girl’s skirts. This becomes Yus life-task. However, one day, he meets the beautiful Yoko and immediately falls in love with her. Unfortunately Yoko (who hates men except of Jesus and Kurt Cobain) thinks he’s a jerk. Instead of Yu, Sasori, a mysterious woman in black wins Yoko’s heart. In reality the women who helped her out in a fight with some thugs, is Yu dressed as a women due to a lost bet. Those thugs act act as the behest of Koike who recruits members for a sect and therefore planned the meeting of Yu and Yoko for a long time as she follows a diabolic plan…

Review

Cinema is great because everything is possible. Cinema has so many different genres. Japanese director Shion Sono, however, wants more. He doesn’t want to make a movie in a certain genre.  That’s why he made Love Exposure, a 237 minutes long monumental artwork which contains everything you could think of… religious fanaticism, sexual perversion, martial-arts, romance, splatter and a lot more. The movie is a drama, comedy, satire, horror movie, romance and action movie at the same time. It is one wild trip, a unique experience which, observed as a whole,  can be broke down to the most simplest and most beautiful story of the world: two people fall in love with each other. With good cause it was awarded with the Caligari-Price of the Berlinale. The jury justified this award with the words: “Great art which is entertaining but always smart and competent. The movie activates to think about the essence of love, religion and the cohabitating of humans and therfore is more political than many so-called political movies.” These words perfectly describe this movie. I don’t want to tell you too much about this movie as it is adviseable to watch it without knowing too much. All I can say is that it is weird, thrilling, touching, funny and, despite it’s runtime of about 4 hours, very entertaining. I’ve never watched a 4 hour movie which passed by so fast. A true masterpiece and one of the best movies I’ve seen in years…

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