Sono Sion's Love Exposure (Ai no Mukidashi) may have a 237-minute running time - a length usually indicative of directorial grandiosity, but it is an unpretentious mix of broad satire, much of which targets religion in various guises; stylish martial arts action; and full-throated affirmations of love.
Fans of Sono's previous films, including Suicide Club (Jisatsu Circle, 2002), Noriko's Dinner Table (Noriko no Shokutaku, 2005) and Exte: Hair Extensions (Exte, 2007), will find much of this familiar. Still, Love Exposure represents a departure for Sono, who has never tried anything so ambitious.
The film's protagonist, Yu (Nishijima Takahiro) is a high school boy who becomes a pervert ninja, leaping and somersaulting as he surreptitiously snaps the panties of passing women. He is doing it not for erotic thrills, but to please his Catholic priest father (Watabe Atsuro), who insists that Yu confess his sins, even when he has none. Once he takes up "candid" photography, however, he has plenty to tell Dad every day.
Then, while dressed in drag as Sasori - an iconic heroine from an early 1970s "women in prison" series (another of Sono's obsessions) - Yu helps a hard-fisted, if definitely cute, teenage girl battle a gang of punks. Her name is Yoko (Mitsushima Hikari), but to Yu she is a double of the Virgin Mary, who has been his image of the perfect woman ever since boyhood, when he associated her with his dear departed mother.
Yoko, however, becomes smitten with Sasori - and starts to question her sexual orientation. Then her ditzy stepmother (Watanabe Makiko) moves in with an old lover - Yu's father - and Yu becomes her "brother", as well as a classmate at her new school. Romance seems out of the question, though Yu continues to dream.
Into this tangled web steps Koike (Ando Sakura), a wily leader in a loony cult called Zero Church, who takes more than a missionary's interest in Yu - especially after he falls for Yoko.
Always wearing white and carrying her pet green parakeet, Koike is seductive, manipulative, ruthless. But like Yu and Yoko, she is not quite the two-dimensional cartoon she first seems.
For all its layers of character and theme, Love Exposure is less knotty art than easy-to-digest entertainment. There are plenty of laughs, many of which are supplied by Watanabe Akiko as the priest's blithely devout, daffily hypersexed lover. There is also a terrific score that includes everything from Ravel's “Bolero” to an opening theme song by the psychedelic pop band Yura Yura Teikoku.
Mark Schilling