Introduction
Those of you who have been following Third Window Films’ releases over the past year may have noticed that they have a tendency to release their films in twos, the hope being that if one film doesn’t appeal, there will be an alternate to sate the palate. This January saw a departure from that routine, with the release of just one new film from them, Love Exposure. Still, it is a two-disc release, and the main feature does run just three minutes shy of four hours. It may as well be two films. I don’t know about you, but there’s something about the longer film that I find daunting. Anything approaching three hours demands a commitment in time, and a hope that the bathroom doesn’t beckon too often. I often find that I only have a certain amount of time free to watch a film, and the irony of having a decent DVD collection is that a fair amount of time is spent in the decision making process. I may be in half a mood for an epic, but then a glance at the run time approaching 140 minutes quickly makes me put it back for another day. There’s a reason why the LOTR movies rarely get a rewatch in my house, and it’s not down to a lack of quality. So when Love Exposure turned up for review, with its 237-minute runtime, you can imagine my dismay. It’s a totally unfair and arbitrary reaction, but I was already crafting a summation with the words ‘too, bloody, and long’ prominent in the paragraph. But, I bowed to the inevitable and set aside three nights to take in Love Exposure (it has extra features as well), and just maybe, four hours will simply fly by.

Yu Tsunoda is a teenaged boy with a problem. Born to a Christian family, he lost his mother at a young age, and was raised by his father Tetsu who became a priest. It’s when Tetsu began an illicit affair with an unstable parishioner named Kaori Fujiwara that Yu’s world began to spiral out of control. The relationship didn’t last, and Kaori left Tetsu reeling in guilt and self-recrimination. As a response, Tetsu began to demand that his son confess all his sins, and on a daily basis. The previously pious Yu finds himself seeking out more and more sins to commit, as confession seems to be the only way he can connect with his father, and his ultimate sin is to take upskirt panty shots of young girls, with a super kung-fu camera technique. It’s how he first encounters delinquent Aya Koike. Also, after losing a bet to get the ultimate panty shot, it’s how dressed in drag as ‘Miss Scorpion’ that he meets, and falls in love with teenage schoolgirl Yoko Ozawa.

Aya Koike is a girl of many parts, con artist, drug dealer, highly placed in a religious cult, and it all stems from her own pious upbringing as the daughter of a priest, a priest that constantly abused and belittled her, and twisted her mind with his own warped views of purity and reverence, causing her to self-harm and attack others. When she got out of reform school, she had her ultimate revenge on her father, before starting her new life as an up and coming criminal mastermind. When she catches Yu trying to snap a photo of her nether regions, she’s surprised to find someone who is almost as warped by his upbringing as she was by hers. She decides to make use of Yu and his family, and devises a plan…

Yoko Ozawa has also suffered abuse from her father, and seeing him bring home a string of new ‘mothers’ week after week has had an influence on her. The only man she has any appreciation for is Kurt Cobain, every other male is only worthy of derision, and she’s picked up more than a few self-defence moves to teach any unwitting man a lesson. Her chance to escape her miserable life comes when her father brings home the latest mother for her, Kaori Fujiwara. Kaori is just as unstable as before, but she takes a shine to Yoko, and the two develop a strong friendship. So when Kaori inevitably leaves, she takes Yoko along as her daughter. Yoko’s world really changes though, when one day she gets into a fight with a gang of toughs, and is rescued by an elegant woman named Miss Scorpion. Which settles one thing, Yoko must be a lesbian!

It’s when Kaori decides to go back to Yu’s father, and demand that he marry her that these three young lives are set on an explosive collision course.

Picture
As you would no doubt wearily expect by now, Love Exposure gets the typical NTSC-PAL treatment for its 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer. So expect softness, ghosting, a slight judder to the pans and scrolls, but it never amounts to anything that may detract from the viewing experience. There is one moment of severe pixellation, where the image just breaks up completely, but as it is the very last frame of the movie, just before the disc returns to the main menu, it’s certainly not worth whinging about. Love Exposure is a fairly naturalistic piece, which occasionally drifts off into visual excess. Even the most sedate and realistic movie nowadays is prone to a little CG enhancement, and Love Exposure is no exception, but it all looks of a piece and of high quality throughout. As the main feature is split across two discs, there’s no significant problem with compression and the like.

Sound
Just the 2.0 stereo Japanese track here, although this is a film that would benefit from a little surround extravagance, as it feels as if it does take advantage of no little sound design, especially in the second half. It does appear on the strength of my cursory websearch, that the Japanese release is also a stereo disc. The audio is clear though, and the dialogue audible throughout. Love Exposure also gets some rather appropriate pop to accompany the film. The main focus will be on the subtitles, and they seemed fine and free of errors for the most part, although I do think that the font was a little small. I suppose it looks fine on those 50-inch behemoth televisions that everyone has nowadays. I did find one thing annoying though. There would be two lines of dialogue spoken on screen, the first would go by unsubtitled, and then when the second line was spoken, there would be two lines of subtitles to read. The end credits could have used some translation as well.

Extras
Both discs get animated menus, and the film is split evenly between them, 2 hours on one, and 1 hour 57 on the other. The film just stops abruptly at the end of disc 1 and goes back to the main menu. I think a discrete fade to black, or a title card saying ‘insert disc 2 ‘ wouldn’t have been amiss.

Disc 1 gets a 58-minute long making of documentary. This is as far from the usual EPK nonsense as you can get, and the term ‘warts and all’ certainly isn’t amiss here. The cast and the crew are interviewed, as the camera follows director Sono Sion through the breakneck-paced month-long shoot. He’s self-deprecating and honest, when he isn’t exhausted and anxious, and the same can be said of his actors.

Disc 2 gets the usual batch of Third Window trailers, 16 of them in total, which will probably be enough to fill a half hour or so of your time.

Conclusion
I needn’t have worried. Those were the shortest four hours that I can recall. Indeed, I was seriously tempted to just put the second disc in straight after the first, and it was only the lateness of the hour that stayed my hand. Love Exposure zips by like a fleeting moment, and though your posterior may be numbed by the runtime, never once will your gaze stray towards a clock. It’s an absolutely enthralling, fast-paced and gripping story, with fascinating characters and full of twists, turns and delightful surprises. It’s also one of those films that defy simple categorisation, by turns comedy and drama, romance and action, satire and social comment. At heart it is a deceptively simple story, but it has so many layers to it, so much depth that as the end credits rolled, I was sorely tempted to watch it again straight from the beginning.

It’s also charmingly profane, and unashamed of the offence it may cause. It picks its targets and goes after their jugulars, wringing as much satiric comment and comedy from them as possible. Perhaps the most contentious, in the West at any rate, would be the Catholic Church, which as an institution is shown as relatively benign, but some of the practitioners of the faith leave a bit to be desired. Yu’s upbringing was certainly coloured by his faith, with the themes of sin and guilt playing strongly on both his and his father’s minds. Tetsu becomes a priest following the death of Yu’s mother, and then gets into a proscribed relationship with a parishioner. When it ends badly, he becomes obsessed with sin, his own and his son’s. Aya Koike’s father is also a priest, although he is far more abusive and destructive a figure than Tetsu. So much so that he drives Aya to the Zero Church.

The Zero Church is just the next of this film’s targets, a repressive and secretive cult, promising nirvana to its adherents, and a smokescreen for something a whole lot more sinister. You can equate it to any cult you can think of, but in today’s society, it’s hard not to think of the Church of Scientology when you see how the Zero Church is portrayed. Of course there is then the comment on otaku and the apparent formalisation of Japan’s pervert culture. Yu seeks sins to sate his father’s obsession with rooting out perversion, and the one that seems to connect him most strongly with his father is the pursuit of upskirt panty shots. Surreptitious snappers sneakily wield cameras and try and get the best possible photos of women’s underwear. Yu actually goes to panty shot school, to learn the kung-fu ninja skills required to get the best shots without being caught, and by doing so, he becomes the envy of his friends, and begins climbing a social hierarchy that he was unaware even existed.

I could be here for paragraphs more, as I’ve barely touched the pre-credits sequence (I think 60-odd minutes has to be some sort of a record). But there is so much to this film that is really worth discovering for yourself. It’s probably the most unconventional love story that I have ever seen, and I was thrilled with the way it could switch from comedy to drama at the drop of a hat without compromising its characters. In fact the characters are richly drawn and enthralling, seeing them develop and watching as the film unpeels the layers to them is a large part of the film’s charm. Love Exposure will take you on a roller coaster ride of emotions, and I found it to be profoundly entertaining. It must be said though that it probably isn’t for everyone. It deserves its 18 rating, and there will be moments in this film that do offend. And believe me, there are scenes that will have grown men crossing their legs and wincing in sympathy. It’s irreverent, it’s profane, and it has the most appropriate conclusion to a film that I have seen in a long, long time. After four hours of Love Exposure, you will be left wanting more.