Ai no mukidashi | Japan | 2008
237 minutes
Director/Screenplay: Sono Sion
Producers: Yokohama Toyoyuki, Kawai Shinya
Photography: Tanigawa Sohei
Editor: Ito Junichi
Production designers: Matsuzuka Takashi
Music: Harada Tomohide
With: Nishijima Takahiro, Mitsushima Hikari, Ando Sakura, Watanabe Makiko, Watabe Atsuro
Festivals: Berlin, Karlovy Vary, New Zealand 2009
In Japanese with English subtitles
Censors rating R18 graphic violence, content that may offend
Replete with lashings of Catholic guilt, kick-ass kung fu schoolgirls, new-age cults and a perverse predilection for upskirt photography, this delirious and hypnotic masterwork of Shakespearean proportions is both tasteless and profound in equal measures.
“Forget Titanic. Sono Sion’s four-hour countercultural romantic epic is surely the Gone with the Wind de nos jours. Novelistic in scope and emotional richness, Love Exposure details the long and winding courtship of star-crossed lovers Yu and Yoko. These dysfunctional, hypersensitive Japanese teens and their quest for erotic and spiritual enlightenment make for a swooning, often riotously funny melodrama charged with a refreshingly perverse undertow... This is a film that will have you tingling with pleasure from charming start to heart-pounding finish.” — David Jenkins, Time Out
“One of the most amazing cinematic achievements of the year… this movie will cleanse you of your sins and leave you horny as hell.” — NY Asian Film Festival
