Ai no mukidashi

Plot synopsis:
Chapter 1: YuYu Honda, a young teenage Catholic is attempting to live his life in a faithful and orderly manner. Before his mother dies, she makes him promise that he will marry a woman as beautiful as The Virgin Mary. His father, Tetsu, becomes a devout Catholic priest following the death of Yu's mother, and operates his own church. As he grows up, Yu comes to realise that only marrying Mary will suit him, and goes on his search for Mary. A woman named Kaori becomes obsessed with Tetsu, and forces her love on him, which he eventually reciprocates. Together, the three move into a new house where their relationship is kept a secret. Tired of this secrecy, Kaori leaves the house, which leaves Tetsu broken and depressed. He makes Yu come to confessional every day, and demands to know his sins. Yu, unable to think of any sins he might have committed, lies, but is caught. He decides to deliberately commit sins and confess them to his father.Tetsu becomes displeased with this, and moves to his church, almost disowning Yu as his son. Yu falls in with a gang of three delinquent boys named Takahiro, Yuji and Senpai, who teach him to steal, fight and live on the streets, amused by his need to commit sins only to confess them to his father. They suggest he try something more provocative, which a Catholic priest would not tolerate, and take him to a man named Llyod, who specialises in a "kung fu" technique of taking voyeuristic "panty shot" photos of girls in public. After great training, Yu becomes an expert himself at taking "panty shot" photos, but unlike others, does not do it for perverted reasons, but simply out of a need to commit sins. When he confesses his activities to his father, Tetsu beats him as a father would beat his son, which pleases Yu. He refuses to take Yu's confession, and throws him out of the church, where Yu piously prays to God even in the rain.A gang of three girls, led by Koike pass him and he photographs them, but is caught. Koike however, lets him go, amused about his situation. Yu's friends see this and are greatly inspired by Yu, whom they approach to be trained themselves. Yu obliges, and the four operate as a ring of voyeur photographers, comparing each others photos and rating them. On one such day, Yu bets that if Yuji's photo is better than his, he will wear female clothes, kiss a girl he likes and profess his love in a female voice. Yu loses the bet, and goes out wearing the outfit worn by Meiko Kaji in Female Convict #701: Scorpion, and refers to himself as Sasori (Scorpion).He finds a girl being attacked by a large group of thugs, while she stands off against them. Taking this to be his chance, Yu attacks the group, fighting side-by-side with the harassed girl, whom he sees as the Mary he had promised to marry. The title card is shown at this point.Chapter 2: KoikeKoike, who performs many fraudulent and illegal activities such as drug-dealing, works for a New Religious Movement called the Zero Church, of which she is the regional leader. The daughter of a man seen by society as a model Christian, she was frequently abused by him as a child, physically and sexually. As she grows up, she comes to resent all sex and violently attacks men. One day, she finds that her father has had a stroke, but with a full erection. She takes her revenge by snapping his penis and then chopping it off.Extremely happy after doing so, she ends up meeting the Director of the Zero Church, who inducts her in their ranks and tells her that she has the unique ability to seek out the "original sin"s of others (which she explains is how she came to discover Yu). Unbeknownst to Yu however, she continues to observe and film him, electronically eavesdropping on his conversations with his father and in a board meeting of the Zero Church, proposes a plan to convert Yu's entire family.Chapter 3: YokoYoko grew up with an abusive father who often brought women home and neglected her. Growing up, Yoko becomes fatalistic and comes to hate the very idea of a happy family. She develops a hatred for men, but her life is changed when she meets Kaori, whom her father brings home one day. Kaori and Yoko come close to the point where Yoko accepts Jesus, while being treated to every whim and fancy by her new foster mother Kaori.Kaori however, returns to Tetsu's church and beings to force her love on him, which he resists. Obsessed with him, Kaori rams her car into his, crashing it until she can finally achieve him again. Tetsu returns home with Kaori, much to Yu's surprise, and declares that he will be giving up his priesthood in order to get married to Kaori. When Kaori breaks the news to Yoko, she gets angry and walks away.Meanwhile, Koike, who had been observing Yoko as well as Yu, organises the group of henchmen who harass her before Yu, prompting his intervention in the fight.Chapter 4: SasoriFighting as the enigmatic Sasori, Yu inspires Yoko and the henchmen are dealt with. As per the bet, Yu kisses her after the fight and tells her that he loves her before departing. After this event, Yu realises that this is the first time he has had an erection to a girl - confirming that the girl, Yoko is his Mary.Yu becomes infatuated with Yoko, while Yoko comes to believe that she is a lesbian and becomes infatuated with Sasori. Yu loses interest in his "panty shot" photography, and finds that Yoko will be joining his class as a new student. As Yoko has no interest in Yu, he finds himself unable to approach her directly. When dressed up as Sasori however, Yoko lets her guard down. Yu gives her his number, and finds later that night that Tetsu will be marrying Kaori once he is relieved of his priesthood by the Vatican. Yoko is repulsed when she learns that Yu will be her brother, and calls Sasori. Yu, as Sasori, advises Yoko to be more understanding of him and to understand that perverts have a reason for being the way they are. Sasori ultimately makes Yoko promise that she will treat Yu more affectionately, and as a brother.Yoko does as told, and this sudden improvement in their relations pleases Yu, who still finds himself unable to reveal to her that he is Sasori. The next day however, Koike joins Yu's class as a new student. As per Koike's instructions, henchmen attack the class seeking Sasori. Yu is pushed aside by Koike, who dispatches the thugs and declares that she is Sasori, before Yoko. Yoko is overjoyed to learn that Sasori is in her class, and the two start to have close sexual relations, much to Yu's chagrin. Koike repeatedly taunts Yu, who is infuriated with her designs.Meanwhile, Tetsu's faith in Catholicism starts to waver as he is chastised by his superiors for wanting to give up priesthood in favour of romance. He breaks a long-standing family tradition by not saying grace before dinner. Koike embeds herself in Yu's family, coming to help Yoko with her homework and often for sleepovers, in which she'd have sex with Yoko. She also comes to be the family's spiritual guide and counsels Tetsu and Kaori. When Yu learns that Koike slept with Yoko in his Sasori outfit and has discovered his stash of photographs, he knocks her out cold and decides to reveal the truth about Sasori to Yoko.Yoko however is repulsed by this, and runs away, leaving Yu helpless and angry. The next day, Koike spreads videos and photos of Yu's perverted photos in the school, leading to Yu's expulsion. Yu's family becomes estranged from him, and Tetsu beats him. With Yoko avoiding him, Yu runs away from home, running wildly in the streets screaming Yoko's name. He is eventually found by his friends Senpai, Yuji and Takahiro, and returns to takes refuge in them and recounts his tale.Sneaking into school, Yu learns that both Yoko and Koike have stopped attending school. He finds his home abandoned, and that Tetsu has been missing from Church. Koike managed to convince the family that it was the parents' immoral and sinful behaviour that caused Yu to become a perverted sinner, and inducts Yoko, Tetsu and Kaori into the Zero Church, where they are placed under brainwashing sessions.Yu receives a call from Koike, taunting his situation and advising him to join a porn video company called Bukkake-sha, where he is accepted. The company president is pleased with his skills and assigns him a job filming adult videos in the Tosatsu genre, which is Yu's specialty. Yu is told by Koike's sidekicks that he will continue to work in Bukkake-sha if he wants to see Yoko again. The videos become highly successful, as Yu is motivated by the promise of seeing Yoko again. The company president is impressed with Yu and offers him an active role in adult videos, which Yu fervently denies.Yu is instead placed as a performer in a "weird show" for perverts, wherein he is introduced as the immoral son of a Catholic priest, who "forgives" perverts for their perverted thoughts that they confess to him. He eventually meets Koike's sidekicks again, who show him a video of a brainwashed Yoko. Furthermore, he finds Yoko in a TV report on an attempted suicide in the Zero Church, and he takes researches means to recover Yoko from the Zero Church, but is largely unsuccessful.One day, Yu's friends organise a plan in which Yoko is abducted and taken to an empty beach, tied up and left alone with Yu till she breaks. Yoko refuses to give in, repeatedly calling him a pervert, and a few days into her abduction, tricks Yu into releasing her. Yu catches her and tries to convince her to leave Zero Church, calling it a sham, declaring that even if he is a perverted sinner, he at least has the dignity of being one. Yoko recites the entirety of Corinthans 13, and refuses to give into what she perceives is Yu's perverted love.The next day, Koike and the director of the Zero Church arrive at the beach, having caught Yu's friends. Yu is beaten up and Koike orders Yoko to cut off Yu's penis, while Yu hesitates. Eventually, the director intervenes and invites Yu to join Zero Church, under the condition he strive to get rid of his pervert nature, and prove it by not having an erection while facing Yoko. Yu joins the Church and manages to not have an erection while facing Yoko, and is taken as a dedicated member of the Church.Pretending to be a dedicated member to the cultlike organisation, he discovers Yoko's location and procures dynamite, a katana, a knife and the Sasori outfit, with the help of his friends. He raids the Zero Church facility where Yoko is being kept and brainwashed, and kills the Zero Church's director. Dressing up as Sasori, he arrives before Yoko alongwith his family and Koike. Restrained by Tetsu and Kaori, and with Yoko retreating away from him, he uses the dynamite to blow up a lower floor of the facility, forcing police intervention.When he starts to attack Koike, Yoko starts to strangle him to death, causing him to bleed from his eye, making it look like he's crying blood. Yu breaks free, but has a nervous breakdown and becomes mentally affected. Koike is amused by Yu's breaking down, and says that he has become the same as her and kills herself with the katana. All the while, Yoko cries out of fear and stress.Last ChapterOnce the cult's brainwashing activities come to light, it is closed down. Tetsu and Kaori join a victim support group and appear to return to normal. Yoko goes to live with her relatives, where she uneasily settles into ordinary family life again. She comes to profusely miss Yu, watching the Tosatsu adult videos he made. Eventually, she breaks down on remembering how he cried blood when she tried to strangle him. She berates herself for not having known anything then, and for never having understood Yu.Yu is placed in an mental institution where he has developed a complex in which he is Sasori, and he attacks invisible foes with his katana. Yoko comes to meet him and finds that he does not recognise her, and greets her as Sasori, only remembering that he once saved a girl like her. Yoko presses on him and insists that he is her brother and that he opened her eyes and rescued her from Zero Church. She drives the doctors away and is forcibly taken away by the police, while Yu remains in shock. Shortly thereafter, however, he sees a reflection of himself from below in which he sees his erection, and realises that he is a man.Having flashbacks of his childhood, and the fight in which he first met Yoko, he regains his memories and starts running frantically out of the institution, meeting up with Yoko as she is being taken away by the police. At long last, the two are finally united.

Tags: pornographic, cult, romantic, brainwashing, plot twist, sadist

Review:
The typical art film could be boring or pretentious, but Sono never ever bores the audience and that assertion goes doubly for the fact that this film is four hours long.It may be no coincidence that the Japanese title for Love Exposure begins with 'Ai No...' which is similar to the original title for In The Realm Of Senses (Ai No Korida), the other infamous Japanese anti-mainstream movie.
This film was recommended to me when I mentioned going to a film festival in London, so I read a little about it and it gathered that it was a four hour plus Japanese movie with themes surrounding Catholic guilt, love, up-skirt fetishism, and transvestism.
Despite numerous sashays forward and back in time and a pretty complex plot, what we've got here is basically a love story between star-cross'd lovers, a young man Yu, and a young woman Yoko.
We quite often see ornate gold and mother of pearl rosaries being held by female characters, and the ritual of confession becomes incredibly fetishised, literally causing Yu to commit far more sin than he would otherwise have done.It occurs to you occasionally that the film is low budget, as some of the cinematography is reminiscent more of a documentary than a high production values movie.
Some of the many ideas the film dealt with in the 4 hour runtime included commentary on religion, cultism, perversion, growing up and coming of age, love, and life.
With such an engagingly innocent central character as schoolboy Yu, it seems completely natural to suspend disbelief and go along with everything he experiences, including his hilarious initiation into the skills of a panty photographer, his role as father-confessor at a perverts' convention and his attack with explosives and much blood letting on the HQ of a brainwashing religious cult.
The film's Christian angles are a little tougher to get a hold on, but ultimately I feel Sono's stance is satirical (rightfully so) regarding the hypocrisy of organized religion while not completely writing off the possibility of a fulfilling spiritual life.
I am a little concerned about the casual treatment of Yoko's lesbianism (which I can't get into without spoiling) but I suppose that's usually going to be an issue when you have a male writer/director tackling the subject.Despite the hefty length, the movie is never dull, mixing up styles and tones in a way that keeps you wondering what will happen next.
Due to other commitments, I had to undertake watching the recording in 3 manageable pieces, turning each into 'normal' film lengths.Lurching between high melodrama and lamenting ballad, Love Exposure IS a love story.
If you think though that this is just about emotional roller-coasting, there are some of the most striking story lines and stunts and ideas that have come from a fertile, imaginative and superb director, that mix martial arts with technology, religion with sex, perversion with love and much more.The choice of music, from Ravel's 'Bolero' to other brilliant rock pieces, that were repeated in loops really added to the structure and my enjoyment and I'm sure they hypnotised us into feeling the film shorter than it actually was.
Truly a one-of-a-kind experience: this is a massive epic that weaves an impressively deep and invoking story, which includes the search for true love, coming-of-age themes, family values, kung-fu, cross-dressing, upskirt photography, perverts, religion, sin, fanaticism, and dangerous cults.
To think the film was originally going to be six hours) would get tiresome, but surprisingly, Love Exposure never once drags.
Overall, the film takes its time to let the story and characters breathe, making the story and characters easily accessible and relate-able, and it does so without being boring or overdone.You'd also think that this film could be cut down further, but strangely, the story actually benefits from its lengthy runtime, and uses up every minute of it.
With such an ambitious plot structure at work, the film manages to dig up some important themes regarding love, life, and religion, and possibly other things.The film is shot and edited in an interesting manner; at times, the way it frames and puts images together reminds me a lot of an anime series.
Love Exposure is Sion Sono's first truly great film.
Love Exposure continues Sono's themes of alienated youth on the fringes of cults and the extremes of pop culture, but here he gives himself the freedom to be funny, sweet, frail, absurd, and exciting.
His small sins are quickly not enough for his father who thinks he's just making it up and not really concerned with sin and thus his immortal soul.It is only when he meets a group of street kids, and begins learning the secret art of up skirt panty photography (peek-a-panty), that his father reacts and beats him, finally not acting like an impartial priest but an enraged father.This backfires a bit for Yu when his father moves out of the house completely, to live in the church and be "closer to God".
This is all played out in black comedy fashion, the peek-a-panty training sequence which uses elements of kung-fu and acrobatics to capture the naughty pics, being some of the most especially funny.Yu's incorruptibility while he performs these increasingly corrupt acts is another thing that keeps this movie from wallowing in its transgressions.
In fact none of the characters even the film's villain, the young leader and "criminal mastermind" of the Zero Church (a Scientology/Aum inspired cult; the Aum carried out the deadly Serin gas attacks in a Tokyo subway in 1995, an event which seems central to much of Sono's work) named Koike, who strokes a small green parrot like a James Bond villain, is motivated throughout the havoc she wreaks, not by a desire for world domination, by her love for Yu.Yu out one day in drag after losing a bet, encounters a group of inexplicable street toughs harassing a girl, who comes to resemble "his Maria" the girl he has been searching for all this time (and who he insists he will know because she will be the first to give him an erection).
To make a four hour story short, Yu and Yoko become step brother and sister, and Yu is put in a Tootsie/Spiderman like position of having created an alter-ego the love of his life is more interested in than "the real him".Then things heat up, dramatically and under the collar, when Koike whose been observing impassively for the first hour or so, enters the picture claiming to be Ms. Scorpion (Yu's alter ego, the spitting image of Blank Blank in Lady Prisoner), and seducing Yoko (in many a lesbian school girl make-out session) in order to get closer to Yu.I'll stop there with plot, because there are still two and half more hours I would have to describe.
Goodness and perversion are the two twin themes throughout the film, just as I've said each character is motivated in some ways by love, but they all different definitions of what love is.
Though love may lead take on one on many a strange "detour" in life, it ultimately really does conquer all (see Corinthians 13).For these reasons and too many more to write down, Sonos up-skirt peek-a-panty ninja quest for the Virgin Mary as Holy Grail is one of the best love stories, coming of age tales, and movies of the decade.
I hope when it gets released stateside it comes with its full run time intact, because it's the first four hour movie I've ever seen that I sincerely didn't want to end..
There is no point one should criticize an artwork like Love Exposure, with all elements a good film should consist of.
This is what I personally believe to be the best film ever made by one my favorite director Sion Sono.It's hard to believe how this film is 4 hours long and I still never wanted it to end, it's never boring, it's always charming, always funny and always intelligent.
How is this even possible?This film is such a trip of emotions, the story goes around religion, love, fetish and social standards and it all sums up in a beautiful and crazy experience.
This film is incredible Sono overall is kinda like Takashi Miike but he's able to make a 4hr film & hold your attention right till the end it's filled with dark comedy, twisted story lines & random characters with violence & sex it's so absurd all u can do is laugh, even in the most violent parts but it also has beauty, tenderness, tension, psychological, and many other facts which makes this brilliant film so profound If you haven't seen Miike's Ichi the Killer (2001) or Sono's Cold Fish (2010), then do that first before tackling this 4hr beast so you have some context of this fascinating masterpiecehttp://samuellbronko.tumblr.com/post/120084197997/love-exposure-2008- sion-sono-10-10-added-to.
And I must say i'm a huge fan of his work now.I'm going to try and keep spoilers out of this review for obvious reasons, go and watch this movie.The film (for me) centres around three young individuals Yu, Yoko and Koike.
All these aspects work amazingly and somehow bring all these characters together in some bizarre ways.The film is 4 hours long, yes that is a long time for a the average film goer also it does have some violent and bloody moments so if you're squeamish you have been warned, but if you give this movie a chance i'm sure the time will fly by.
I instantly wanted to give it another watch.Overall, Love Exposure is a phenomenal movie and I would highly recommend anyone who has been interested reading my review to go and watch it.
Lastly, I have to say that the movie is really top notch from almost every aspect, like filming, acting, character development etc.
All the characters' (which you are so easily drawn by) reactions, development, morale behind their actions add up to where the plot leads them.What Mr. Sion Sono wanted to do (and succeeded in) with this movie is tell a story about actions and reactions, about how people from similar backgrounds can easily be both same, yet so different.
It's a story about love, pain, strength, devotion, kindness and ultimately, morale.4 hour length of the movie is very justified by the complexity of the plot.
But they are important and the story demands them.The movie films a bit ridiculous and unreal sometimes, but never boring though.
Love Exposure is one of the most entertaining Movies i have seen jet.You may think 237 Minutes is a long time but this Movie is not a single second to long , the Story is thrilling and the Charackters are fantastic.
Unfortunately he's also a self-confessed pervert, looking for his one and only Mary, who happens to be a man-hating, Nolan-loving girl who falls for him whilst he's in drag (as a dare).Once the love triangle is introduced things become even more interesting with the addition of two new characters who have a complex back-story.
There's a lot to admire in Love Exposure with its incredible characterisation, exciting and interesting writing with a complex story-line, but being four hours it takes away its effectiveness.
after all, it does contain scenes of castration, geysers of fake blood, an endless parade of orchestrated pantyshots, and realizations of true love on contemplating one's erection.It may come as a surprise to anybody unfamiliar with S(h)ion Sono's previous works that Love Exposure feels like a student film.
If you want to watch a wonderful love story, Rainbow Song (2006) is a lot better and features real acting, if you like trash, few films beat spy-fi softcore anti-Iraq flick The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (2003).
There are so many weird scenes that the overall story gets a bit lost on the way, and you have a hard time appreciating the movie as a whole.However I have to give it some credit for being so full of life all the way through the entire 4 hours.
But years later, and racked with the displaced guilt being piled upon him by his failing priest father, he becomes, naturally, the leader of a martial-arts panty-shot photography gang, and his antics bring him to the attention of both a cult-leading psychotic with an abusive past, and the kick-ass girl of his dreams who falls in love with his cross-dressing alter-ego.At this point we are about fifty minutes into the set-up of Sion Sono's epic Japanese misfit soap opera, and now the opening titles roll.
Love exposure is a long movie, and changes of style and exposed themes make it almost feel like a few different films, and even though some moments of it are not quite as interesting and entertaining as the others, in the end you will still get one of the most enjoyable and unique experiences movie can provide..
Instead, Sion Sono takes us through the story of Yu Honda and his love of his young teenage life, Yoko, as if it's in homage to City of God: things move forward fast by way of the characters' narration taking us along, telling us the back-stories and then how they meet in an outrageous, fateful moment.It's too hard to simply condense all of what Love Exposure is "about".
This should not be a mark against Sion Sono, on the contrary it's a mark of a film so rich in a creative story, of characters wholly developed in their various tragic and twisted and sometimes very funny ways that it almost does a disservice to have to break everything down into simple summaries.
It's a film that takes many chances as outrageous satire and sordid melodrama with its ideas and details and succeeds on nearly all of them.It all starts with the protagonist, Yu Honda (Takahiro Nishijima) telling us in narration how he was raised: his mother died when she was very young, instilling in him and Honda's father a sense of religious purpose (the Mother Mary comes into play very early at this point, and Sono comes back to it later as a device of infatuation for Yu).
But the "Father" is insistent, and so Yu takes up more "sins" such as petty theft with a gang, and this soon leads into one of the real highlights of the film, which is Yu's training and mastering of the art of taking lighting-quick pictures up teenage girl's skirts for their panties, all for the ironic "approval" of having sinned enough for the confession, with hilariously disastrous results He loses a bet with his friends and has to dress up in drag.
It's from here, at the one hour mark, we move from Yu to Yoko's back-story, even *more* harrowing and melodramatic than Yu's, THEN this leads into another back-story for the pivotal character Koike (Sakura Ando) who has ascended by her rather evil tendencies (she castrated her father as a young girl for abuse, but this isn't even what makes her evil as we find out) in a church called ZERO, which is a cultish church looking to drag families in and brainwash them with their caste system of dehumanization.What happens when Koike starts to infiltrate Yu and his family circle, and in particular with her known connection between Yu and Yoko, shouldn't be spoiled.
Oh sure, it is the story of teenagers in love, and so we get a lot of what makes teens teens: sexual frustration, angsty-tendencies (Yoko has a "I HATE MEN" policy leading to her thinking she may be a lesbian), and being "perverted" in the eyes of the church.
And if you want some actual hardcore drama out of theater there's a show-stopping scene on a beach where Yoko breathlessly and tearfully delivers the entire excerpt from Corinthians 13 to a baffled Yu. The music selections are also phenomenal, ranging from catchy Japanese pop-rock to Beethoven's 7th symphony 2nd movement, surely one of the most dramatic pieces of music for use in a movie let alone this.Love Exposure is crazy, inspired film-making, shot on digital video with care and acted with so much gusto to match with the breakneck speed of the mis-en-scene.
LOVE EXPOSURE is a film unlike anything else you've ever seen before or since (although Sion Sono's follow-up movies, made as part of his unconnected trilogy, COLD FISH and GUILTY OF ROMANCE, come close at times).
At four hours this is a real test of the viewer's ability to take this incessantly crazy storytelling and I confess that I watched it in two settings as I think one would have been just too much for me to take.The film boasts fully-rounded characters and psychological depth that you don't often get in the world of Japanese cult cinema.
When Yu finds out, he abducts Yoko to try to de-programme her, and ends up in the Church himself, following which (if you can believe it) things get unpredictable.This hugely bizarre and very long movie is an astonishing, but always stylish and engaging, mishmash of elements.
I must admit that the four-hour run time of this film nearly put me off however I decided to watch it over two nights and ended up really enjoying it.
The film follows Yu, a boy whose father is a Catholic priest who finds and loses love.
This is all in the first half of the film; later on Yu's father, Yoko and her mother are seduced into joining a sinister cult and Yu must do what he can to rescue her.I was surprised how quickly the time went by while watching this; while the plot was obviously ridiculous it was also very funny.
They could've just utilized and maximized it considering that the movie has already been sensual from beginning anyway, showing how Yu truly loved Yoko, they could've injected some intimate moments with the two of them.And the best part of this is:this is a true story.