ai no mukidashi is the epitome of japanese cinema,
absolutely hysterical but also pushing the boundries of what is moral,
comfortable, and even presentable.
with ai no mukidashi (love exposure) writer/director sion sono (sono shion)
created a four hour long masterpiece of perverse, disturbing, rip roaringly
funny stupidity. making the insanely surreal and dirty completely watchable.
this is not a film i would choose to watch with just anyone, actually there
are very few people i would be comfortable viewing this with, but on
the flip side - this is a piece of art i cannot help but advise people to see.
as it is so long it is more like a mini drama than a movie
and it is split up into chapters. to tell the truth though,
there is no trouble in watching it all in one go.
explaining the premis may be a challenge but i will try...
yu, played by the wonderful nishijima takahiro
(delicious gakuin, ghost friends, and the dance pop group AAA) is the
son of a devout catholic priest, played by watabe atsuro (godhand teru).
in order to please his increasingly messed up father
yu believes he must sin as much as he can
so that he has something to offer in his fathers intense confessionals.
yu befriends some thugs and their gang, winning them over instantly with his
adorable nature twinned with his unshaking desire to sin,
and is taught how to steal, fight, and take covert photographs up girls skirts.
(using full on action stunt man type flips, commando rolls,
team tactics, and swift acrobatics in order to do so)
though at heart he is still pure and innocent
yu is soon dubbed the prince of perverts.
after losing a bet with his friends yu walks through the town in drag and
comes across yoko (mitsushima hikari), whom he doesnt know at this point,
in a fight with a huge gang of guys.
yoko and yu beat the living crap out of them all and they fall for each other...
although yoko thinks yu is a girl.
all this is being watched (and orchestrated) by koike (ando sakura)
a cult leader and underworld crazy person.
her obsession with yu
and gaining his family in her cult drives her to devise twisted plans
involving yoko, her adoptive mother,yu and yu's father.
everyone has some kind of abuse or torment in their past.
it is a little disturbing but it is not lingered on in a horror or thriller type way.
it is a little brutal at times but is always shot with the same surreal light as
the rest of the movie. somehow even with all the humour
the darker scenes dont feel out of place.
this movie is completely nuts. i cant even explain just how crazy i felt
after watching. but i left the film with the same little
scream of laughter with which i entered it.
i should say a little about mitsushima hikari for a moment.
she gave a phenomenal performance and her character was thrown from
one situation to the next in the most taxing of ways.
from her abuse, rebellion, disgust with men,
and her love for miss scorpion (yu in drag),
screaming a whole passage from the bible at her kidknapper,
being brainwashed, and eventually coming to an emotional realisation
that everything she and yu had been through was
completely and utterly screwed up.
that is a lot for a girl to act and she showed her
mature skill through such a young vessel. absolutely flawless.
nishijima takahiro was an absolute star in my eyes from before
ai no mukidashi but boy am i glad i found this movie.
what a performance. i dont think im ever going to look at him in the
same light ever again.
the constant shots of him with a rather large hard on made me
scream with embrassed laughter, and his comic acting throughout
is so natural that it is almost accidental,
but somehow he is completely believable when switching from the
intense smiling masochist calling for his father to hit him again,
to when he is desperately trying to save yoko from the cult
and is screaming and going nuts with a samurai sword.
looking at it now, i cant think of any two people who could have
delivered these roles so innocently. and that is what they needed.
it would not have worked without nishijima's playful smile
and mitsushima's deep eyes.
i felt truly mental for a while after watching it. it is like a void of surreal insanity.
what a piece of art though. ive never seen anything quite like it,
and i think i never will.
this film won an awful lot of awards, and it is not hard to see why.
i almost wish sion sono had been allowed to run with it being its
original 6 hours in length but i darent imagine
what else happened in those two lost hours.
i am just happy that something so perverse was watchable for me,
if it had been too dark or graphic i would not have been able to appreciate it.
i doubt i would have even tried to watch it.
but as it stands it is a completely accessible
wrong but constantly funny movie
well worth setting aside four hours for.
trailer:
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