Teenager Yu grew up with his widowed Catholic father who became a priest and pressured him into confessing sins. Since Yu has no sins, he decides to create some, and thus joins a delinquent gang that snaps photos of women’s underwear. Losing a bet, Yu dresses up as Miss Scorpio, and falls in love with teenage girl Yoko while saving her from bullies, declaring her his “Holy Maria”. Yoko falls in love in Miss Scorpio, since she hates men ever since her father sexually harassed her. When Yu’s father and Yoko’s adoptive mother marry, Yu and Yoko become siblings. Koike is the local leader of a sect, Zero Church, and disguises herself into Miss Scorpio to recruit Yoko and the parents as new members. Yu dresses up as Miss Scorpio, storms the building of the Zero Church, detonates a bomb there and saves Yoko who leaves the cult. Yu lands in a mental asylum, but regains his memory when Yoko visits him, and they fall in love.
You have to hand it to Japanese cinema—they simply have audacity. “Love Exposure” is the darnedest thing: it is a weird patchwork of disparate subplots, unnecessarily overlong with its running time of 4 hours when it could have told the entire story in only 2.5 hours, but you have to see it—just for its sheer audacity. By its tone, it can be compared to Demme’s “Something Wild”, since it changes to new genres and story directions almost every half an hour, starting at first as a variation of “Yes, God, Yes” (a repressed Catholic discovering sexuality), to then change to “Lady Georgie” (a brother infatuated with his adoptive sister), “Tootsie” (Yu is disguised as Miss Scorpio, but Yoko is unaware of his identity), “Tie Me Up!” all through even a little dash of “Oldboy” in the bloody finale. It seems as if the director and writer Sion Sono wanted to cram 5-6 films in one, or that this was intended as an animated series, but was then converted into a live action film.
In spite of this overburdened storyline, the film has some amazing scenes. For example, in the opening act, a timer is set up, since the intermittently inserted titles are saying “365 days until miracle”, “165 days until miracle”, “3 minutes until miracle”... creating a sense of anticipation until the announced event, in this case how Yu and Yoko first meet. The title card appears 58 minutes into the film, also staying true to the film’s weird and untrammeled style. However, there are also some extreme monents in here, such as the one where Koike takes revenge on her violent, abusive father by cutting off his penis while he had a stroke, equipped with a “fountain of blood” coming from the man’s cut genitalia. On the other hand, Koike is presented in a different light by always carrying her green budgerigar parrot on her hand: at the beginning, her father beat her, leaving her lying on the floor with the dead parrot in her hand; in the finale, Koike is dead, and the parrot is alive—making the bird a symbol of her innocent soul contaminated and broken by the cruel world. “Love Exposure” is a cult film because it showed the protagonist’s sexual awakening and escape from any kind of regulation under (religious) ideology, adding crazy ideas, jokes (“I am a pervert with dignity”), puns and allegories, but too many characters do not play a role later on (Yu’s new stepmother, for instance), and this overload without a sense for better editing or focus took a certain toll on this energetic film.
Grade:++
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