Love Exposure

2008 love story

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A guy chases after the girl he's in love with.

Take away the ninja peek-a-panties crews, the Sion Sono blood splatterings, jabs at the perversity of Catholicism, cult gang brainwashing, cross-dressing, castrations and castration threats, and readings of New Testament verses, and you've got a fairly conventional love story. Or maybe a conventional love triangle.

This is a four-hour movie, but I didn't think it felt like one. It seems like Sono had a limited budget, but the sheer amount of ideas he stuffs into this makes up for that. Sono's film isn't exactly wild, but it's rarely predictable, and I'm surprised at how well paced his story is since it's coming at the viewer from so many angles and pulls the viewer is so many directions. Though Takahiro Nishijima's Yu is clearly the movie's main character, each of these characters--Yoko, his love interest; Koike, his nemesis; the father; the father's on-again-off-again girlfriend; even the other members of Yu's gang of acrobatic upskirt photographers--could have enough for their own spin-off movies. The one character I'd love to know more about is a guy who was in about fifteen seconds of the four-hour film--a guy who makes a bomb.