Love Exposure

Forget ‘Titanic’. Sono Shion’s four-hour countercultural romantic epic is surely the ‘Gone with the Wind’ de nos jours. Novelistic in scope and emotional richness, ‘Love Exposure’ details the long and winding courtship of star-crossed lovers Yu (Takahiro Nishijima) and Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima). These dysfunctional, hypersensitive Japanese teens and their quest for erotic and spiritual enlightenment make for a swooning, often riotously funny melodrama charged with a refreshingly perverse undertow.

Yu is the son of a priest but is relentlessly driven towards a life of sin. He learns kung fu with the help of a local street gang. Then he becomes a world champion up-skirt photographer, a pastime he relishes, believing that one day he will snap the panties of his true love. Coming to the rescue of aggressive tearaway Yoko in a street fight, he exhibits a humungous bulge in his slacks that suggests that destiny is calling. But matters are complicated by the fact that, at the time, he happens to be disguised as svelte femme warrior Ms Scorpion, and Yoko’s subsequent decision that she’s a lesbian.

On paper, it sounds like lo-fi madcap idiocy, but Sono manages to elevate this potentially seedy and glib yarn to something approaching pop-philosophical genius. He does this by focusing on a very small group of characters and is served by a clutch of utterly committed, unselfconscious performances from actors who genuinely understand and believe in the material. A segment about religious cult deprogramming in the final hour is perhaps a twist too far, but for the most part this is a film that will have you tingling with pleasure from charming start to heart-pounding finish.