In every major filmmaker's career, there is at least one film that defines who they are as an artist, and which best exemplifies their unique voice. They may go on to make equally accomplished films that may even rank among the best films of all time, but you can always trace a visionary director's work back to a single, exemplary film. For Alfred Hitchcock, that film is Vertigo, and for the maestro Martin Scorsese, that film is Goodfellas. For the controversial and brilliant Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono, that film is his masterpiece Love Exposure (2008), an epic, nearly four-hour long fantasmagoric portrait of youthful love amidst a society torn apart by violence, broken families, and religious fanaticism.
Love Exposure is the first part of a loose trilogy of films by Sion Sono, which also consists of Cold Fish (2010) and Guilty of Romance (2011). Known as his "Hate" Trilogy, Sion Sono explores how love can oftentimes become twisted into obsession and perversion in all three films. While Cold Fish and Guilty of Romance are much more downbeat and nihilistic films, Love Exposure also reaches into some pretty dark depths of human depravity. However, what sets Love Exposure apart from the other two films in the trilogy is its ultimately hopeful message of love as the ultimate form of redemption.
The focus of Love Exposure is on the relationship between Yu Honda (Takahiro Nishijima) and the young woman he is almost hopelessly in love with, the emotionally volatile Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima). Surrounding Yu's obsessive quest for Yoko's love are a plethora of outside forces which constantly threaten to entangle him--Yu's maniacally religious father Tetsu (Atsuro Watabe), a homicidal young woman named Aya Koike (Sakura Ando) who tries to abduct and indoctrinate Yu's family into a cult known as "Zero Church," and Yu's father's new girlfriend Kaori (Makiko Watanabe), a nymphomaniac whose rabid sexual appetite threatens Tetsu's religious beliefs.
Much of Love Exposure is shot with rapidly moving, hand-held cameras, giving it an exhilirating, liberating momentum which reminds one of the rule-breaking 1960s films of the French New Wave era. Scenes are displayed out of chronological order at times, as Sono freely cuts back and forth in time, and the acting in the film approaches a level of inspired hysteria at times that borders on an Andrjez Zulawski level of trance-like performances. You can feel the blood, sweat, and passion of Sono in almost every frame of Love Exposure, and one gets the sense that Sono is finally free of the traditional bounds of studio filmmaking, and he's relishing the opportunity to tell a story in his own original, unique voice.
Against this backdrop of shall we say colorful characters, Sion Sono navigates his protagonist Yu's character arc through some outrageously absurd plot points, including an underground group of misfits who specialize in up-skirt photography of young women as a form of spiritual fulfillment. What ties all these seemingly disparate elements together is the theme of love being distorted into sexual perversion, as reflected in a more humorous manner with the up-skirt photography group, and in a darker manner with the sexual abuse subplot of Aya's character. It's no coincidence that the purpose of the Zero Church cult is to indoctrinate its members to resist all forms of sexual temptation in order to discover a more pure form of love. The final image of Love Exposure, which I will not spoil for the reader, is the purest distillation of this theme of love existing as a pure force of nature, completely divorced from all forms of perversion.
Indeed, the defining moment of Love Exposure occures after Yu abducts Yoko from the Zero Church cult, and she confronts him on a beach. Hovering over Yu like a woman possessed, Yoko gives an impassioned speech about pure love as the greatest human emotion, quoting from Corinthians 13 while Beethoven's Seventh Symphony slowly grows to a crescendo in the background. She contrasts Yu's seemingly sexual obsession with her to the familial and communal love she encountered as a cult member of the Zero Church.
It's interesting that in a career spent making films exploring all forms of human sexual debauchery and taboos, Sion Sono's best film would be one that questioned the very moral nature of these previous films. One gets the sense that Sono is almost atoning for his past "sins" as a filmmaker with Love Exposure, a film which itself contains its fair number of sexually deviant scenes, but which has an underlying current of moral and spiritual judgement running through it. After spending many years exploring the deepest and darkest depths of the human psyche, perhaps Sono has finally discovered and exposed the pure and undying love within all of us as human beings.
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