Love Exposure [Blu-ray]

Director: Sion Sono Sion Sono

Overview

One young man's journey to find the girl of his dreams and please his father takes an unfathomable number of wrong turns and bizarre detours in this epic-scale comedy drama from writer and director Sion Sono. Yu Tsunoda (Takahiro Nishijima) grew up believing in his mother's admonition to find and marry a girl who was pure of heart when he grew up, and after her death, Yu's father (Atsuro Watabe) became a Catholic priest who's very interested in the state of Yu's purity. Father is convinced Yu is guilty of more sins than he's willing to confess; that isn't actually the case, but in order to please his dad, Yu sets out to rack up a more impressive record of wrongdoing. Yu becomes a small-time pornographer, trafficking in photos surreptitiously taken by pointing his camera up the skirts of young women, and his work is impressive enough that he's approached by an adult film company to star in a string of porn films for them. But just as Yu is getting involved in some serious sin, he meets Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima), a beautiful and virginal teenage girl who is appalled by the behavior of most men -- so much so that she constantly challenges them to martial arts battles, which she invariably wins. Yu sets out to win Yoko's heart, but their courtship attracts the attention of Aya Koike (Sakura Ando), a member of a religious cult who thinks she can recruit them to their numbers. Ai No Mukidashi (aka Love Exposure) was an official selection at the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival.

Product Details

Release Date:	09/18/2012
UPC:	0887090049306
Original Release:	2008
Rating:	NR
Source:	Olive
Language:	English
Time:	3:57:00
Sales rank:	10,538

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Takahiro Nishijima	Yû Tsunoda
Hikari Mitsushima	Yôko
Sakura Andô	Koike
Makiko Watanabe	Kaori
Atsuro Watabe	Tetsu Tsunoda
Keisuke Horibe	Yoko's Father
Hiroyuki Onoue	Takahiro
Mami Nakamura	Yû no Haha
Yutaka Shimizu	Yûji
Yuko Genkaku	Keiko
Itsuji Itao	Koike no Chichi
Mitsuru Kuramoto	Reikan Kaiga no Kyaku
Shinji Miyadai	Actor
Nana Nagao	Actor
Koji Ohguchi	Actor
Jai West	Actor
Mitsuru Fukikoshi	Actor
Motomi Fukami	Actor,Actor
Tomohide Harada	Composer
YuraYura Teikoku	Composer

Technical Credits

Sion Sono

Sion Sono	Director,Screenwriter
Haruo Umekawa	Producer
Toyoyuki Yokohama	Executive Producer
Shinya Kawai	Executive Producer
Yoshihiro Nishimura	Makeup Special Effects
Yasushi Eguchi	Sound/Sound Designer
Hajime Komiya	Sound/Sound Designer
Mituyo Ishigaki	Casting,Casting
Kaku Toda	Production Manager
Kenya Morikura	Assistant Director

Editorial Reviews

There are weird movies, there are really weird movies, and then there's Love Exposure, a four-hour epic about Catholic guilt, strange sex, cross-dressing, religious mania, the art of perverted photography, and above all else, the unpredictable nature of love. It drags at times, it looks a little on the cheap side (this is an indie movie from Japan, after all) and the ending fails to wrap up the proceeding 237 minutes in a thematically coherent fashion, but for lovers of arthouse cinema, this is the kind of must-see film that will invade your dreams for weeks afterwards. The film's plot requires a lot of setup: so much so, in fact, that the movie's opening credits don't appear until about an hour into the running time. Yu Tsunoda (Takahiro Nishijima) is a Japanese teenager from a Christian family dealing with the sudden death of his mother, whose last words to him were instructions to marry a woman who reminds him of the Virgin Mary. Meanwhile, Yu's father (Atsuro Watabe) decides to bury his grief over his wife's death by becoming a Catholic priest, resulting in him being more and more militant about insisting that Yu confess his sins in church. The only problem is that Yu doesn't have any sins -- he's as mild-mannered and innocuous as they come, but his father insists that he must be doing something wrong, so Yu decides to make his father happy by joining a group of local troublemakers who spend their days taking upskirt photos of unsuspecting women (in one of the film's many eccentric touches, this pastime is imagined as a sort of martial art involving acrobatic maneuvers to take the photos without getting caught). The first act of Love Exposure chronicles Yu's misadventures as the world's most wholesome pervert, and it only gets stranger from there, as both Yu and his father embark on unlikely love affairs -- Yu falls for a fiery, man-hating feminist named Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima), whom he meets while dressed as a woman on a dare from his friends, while his father strikes up a relationship with an emotionally unstable parishioner (Makiko Watanabe) who turns out to be Yoko's stepmother. Pretty soon all of them are living under one roof, and then Yu and his father are targeted by a sinister cult looking to convert them in order to improve their credibility and then... Suffice it to say, this review would end up being three times as long if it had to provide a complete synopsis. And regardless, the brilliance of Love Exposure isn't found in the fact that the plot makes sense in the end (it doesn't), but in the way it ricochets from one scene to the next, constantly bursting with new ideas and refusing to settle on just one emotional tone. A scene in a restaurant in which Yu tries to win over Yoko by switching back and forth between himself and his cross-dressing female alter ego "Miss Scorpion" feels like something out of a million corny sitcoms, while a flashback in which a cult leader (Sakura Ando) gets revenge on her abusive father may turn the stomach of even the most desensitized connoisseur of ultraviolence. Yu's life as a pornographer is played for laughs, but Love Exposure's views on love and religion are treated seriously, as the film views both as potentially uplifting but easily corrupted. In particular, Yoko's devout Christian faith is contrasted with the spiritual emptiness of the film's adults, who jump from one religion to the next hoping to find satisfaction, but ultimately end up in a deprogramming group (which is depicted as just one more creed for them to obsess over). Profane and spiritual, disturbing and warmhearted, perverted and romantic, Love Exposure is a fascinating gem from the outer edges of extreme Asian cinema.