Love Exposure

Theatrical Release Date: 2011 09 01 (USA - Limited)

UPC: 887090031509

Studio: Olive Films

MPAA Rating: NR   Contains:null

Summary: 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. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Category: Drama

Awards: Film Presented – New York Asian Film Festival

Love Exposure

Format: Digital Video Disc (DVD)

Release Date: 12/20/2011

Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 Alternate Wide Screen

Audio: DD2 Dolby Digital Stereo

Runtime: 237 Minutes

Sides: 1

Number of Discs: 1

Subtitles: English

Region: USA & territories, Canada

Chapters: Disc #1 -- Love Exposure
1. Opening [:11]
2. 365 Days to the Miracle [19:36]
3. 65 Days to the Miracle [20:30]
4. Love Exposure [18:18]
5. The Miracle [29:57]
6. The Imposter [27:32]
7. King of the Perverts [5:02]
8. Love's Captive [16:41]
9. New Disciple [25:28]
10. The Lion's Den [21:37]
11. Support Groups [12:39]
12. True Love [12:36]

Jack Rodgers

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. ~ Jack Rodgers, Rovi

Cast and Crew: Shinya Kawai  Executive Producer 
Toyoyuki Yokohama  Executive Producer 
Sion Sono  Director 
Sion Sono  Screenwriter 
Haruo Umekawa  Producer 
Tomohide Harada  Composer (Music Score) 
YuraYura Teikoku  Composer (Music Score) 
Takahiro Nishijima  Actor 
Hikari Mitsushima  Actor 
Sakura Ando  Actor 
Makiko Watanabe  Actor 
Atsuro Watabe  Actor 
Keisuke Horibe  Actor 
Hiroyuki Onoue  Actor 
Mami Nakamura  Actor 
Yutaka Shimizu  Actor 
Yuko Genkaku  Actor 
Itsuji Itao  Actor 
Mitsuru Kuramoto  Actor 
Shinji Miyadai  Actor 
Nana Nagao  Actor 
Koji Ohguchi  Actor 
Jai West  Actor 
Mitsuru Fukikoshi  Actor 
Motomi Fukami  Actor 

Country: Japan