Love Exposure (2008)

Sion Sono’s movie is four hours long. Four hours. Seriously. So, there’s that.

Providing a synopsis, or even an introduction, to a four hour movie provides some challenge, which I’ll try to meet. The movie focuses on three teenagers: Yu (Takahiro Nishijima), an innocent pretty boy; Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima), the troubled girl he loves; and Koike (Sakura Ando), a young recruiter for a cult known as the Zero Church. Those are pretty superficial descriptions, but they’ll have to do. The three have a lot in common, aside from proximity: each has a (very) problematic relationship with his or her parents; each one has problems with sex and sexuality; and each one has a problematic (there’s that word again) relationship with religion.


OK, but what is it actually about? It goes something like this: Yu’s Catholic mother dies when he is very young, leaving him with a confused and complicated idea about love that might simply boil down to a good ol’ Oedipal Complex. Yu’s only real memory of his mother is her praying before the Virgin Mary, and telling Yu that, some day, he’ll have to introduce his own Mary to her. Yu’s life-long ambition becomes finding his “Mary,” his one true love (I might as well just tell you it’s Yoko). Yu’s father reacts, well, oddly to his wife’s death, and becomes a Catholic priest. He then becomes embroiled in a love affair, gets even more confused, and begins sadistically forcing his son, Yu, to confess his sins, at length, every day. And they better be good ones.

And there’s the problem. Since Yu is such a nancy boy, he has no sins to confess. So, he joins a gang, and becomes a pervert. He is mentored in the ways of taking peek-a-boo, upskirt panty shots. Utilizing some form of advanced Kung Fu, Yu snaps pictures of girls’ undies with style and panache; once his talent is discovered, he begins working for a porn company, and becomes known as the King of the Perverts. All to impress his dad in the confessional.

During Yu’s perverse odyssey, he encounters, first, Koike, who is the film’s chief antagonist. She decides to manipulate Yu, since she loves him (I suppose), and her love is unrequited. Koike hates men in general, and works for the Zero Church, which gets its money through charitable donations and from kidnapping the families of church members, presumably selling their stuff. Her primary goal in life becomes keeping Yu separate from Yoko, his “Mary,” the one woman he truly loves.


Jesus, this is getting long. Anyway, Yoko is another teenager, whose hatred for men only excludes two examples: Kurt Cobain and Jesus Christ. Yu first sees her when she is being beset upon by a gang of hooligans, who she is all-too-eager to fight. But here’s the complication: though Yu immediately recognizes her as his one true love, he can’t really act upon it, since, due to a forfeit from a pervert competition, he’s currently in drag. And not just any drag: he’s dressed up like the protagonist of the Female Prisoner Scorpion films.

And then shit gets complicated. Koike throws a monkey wrench in things by pretending to be the real Miss Scorpion, and she and Yoko begin a love affair, excluding Yu from the mix. Throw in an ass-ton of heavy-handed Catholic imagery, lots of perverts, Manga-style editing and action, some Kung Fu, and plenty of panty shots--plus more melodrama than you can shake a stick at--and what you end up with is four hours of Love Exposure.


What’s really incredible about Love Exposure is that it even exists. I mean, it’s a four hour epic romance about perverts and cross-dressers and Kung Fu. What the fuck. I couldn’t help but think of Tarsem’s The Fall; both are clearly a labour of love, and their very existence defies the logic of the marketplace and the current status of global cinema. It should also be pointed out that, while four hours hardly fly along (and you should distrust anyone making such a claim), the film hardly seems onerous or dull. And that’s quite an achievement.

One major issue I have with the film, though, is that I feel, in a way, it wimps out. For four hours, the audience gets an inside look at perversion, from incest to lesbianism to voyeurism to cross-dressing, etc. And Yu makes the point, again and again, that “perverts” are perverts for a reason. They’re shown sympathetically; in fact, they’re shown as the norm, with the straight, monogamous heterosexual relationships almost always being represented as dysfunctional. But, in the end, Yu gets the girl; Love Exposure ends up reinforcing heteronormativity, making the long haul through the rest of the film seem like a long (and perhaps tedious) diversion through juvenile perversions, only to end up with a more mature heterosexual monogamy. And that’s a shame, since it effectively undercuts the subversive intentions (or at least the subversive direction) of the rest of the film. I can’t come down too hard on this ending, though, since it doesn’t betray the film’s other major theme: Catholicism. The crucifix and the Virgin Mary are among the first images that appear on the screen, and recur throughout, adding more complication than clarification.

Sion Sono’s Love Exposure is a hell of an achievement. But does that mean it’s worth seeking out? I … don’t know. I’ve seen the film, and thought about it a great deal, and I can’t tell if it’s genius, or if its boosters are confusing it for genius based on the size of its undertaking. It’s something unlike any film I’ve ever seen before, though, and that’s certainly an accomplishment.

A Bittersweet Life (2005)

"The Aesthetics of Violence"

It’s a familiar story: our hero, Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun), is a serious gangster, an enforcer for Mr. Kang. When Mr. Kang leaves town, he asks Sun-woo to look after his young girlfriend, Heesoo (Shin Min-a). Oh, and Heesoo might have a lover--if she does, kill ’em both.

And so Sun-woo takes on the job, inevitably falling in love with the elegant Heesoo. When he discovers that she does, in fact, have a lover, he is both heartbroken and duty-bound to exterminate them. Except, of course, he shows mercy. Bad form for a gangster.

When Mr. Kang returns, he is less than pleased. Allying himself with Sun-woo’s rival, Baek Jr., Kang sends his son and his men to track down Sun-woo, torture him, and kill him. But Sun-woo won’t go down so easily, and once he decides to go after his old partners in crime, nothing will stop him, not until he kills every last one of those motherfuckers.


So, Kim Ji-woon’s A Bittersweet Life presents nothing new, at least, not insofar as narrative goes. But then again, how many original gangster films are there? It seems like a necessarily limited genre. That’s hardly the point. What A Bittersweet Life does is take a familiar story and tell it with beautiful people wearing beautiful clothing. These beautiful people are filmed with immaculately composed shots--a moving watercolour in Technicolor.

And when violence occurs--and it does, readily--it’s like this veneer of beauty is brutally, horrifically torn open. The violence is at least two-fold--violence to the man, and violence to the image.


What oddly strikes me, on a second viewing of the film, is the focus on clothing. Sun-woo’s suits are sleek, well-tailored, and expensive looking. Hardly what a gangster needs to wear when he’s scheduled for a knife fight. Our (and Sun-woo’s) first glimpse of Heesoo is her feet, as she tries on different shoes. Baek Jr.’s enforcer, when he comes after Sun-woo, is set apart by his eccentric choice of headwear: a shapeless fishing hat. The man’s psychopathology is hinted at, to the audience, not by his actions, but by his hat. A Bittersweet Life is a world of surface. We’re accustomed to looking beneath the surface to find deeper meaning. Here, we just find blood.

In this film, violence hurts. Bullets aren’t just magic dots that render their victims lifeless; instead, they’re little explosions, ripping their victims apart. Bullets don’t just thud into a gangster’s chest, but blow off his fingers, crack open his elbow. Blood smears the aesthetically-designed world around him.

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As I said, the narrative of the film follows a pretty standard trajectory. And that’s part of the fun, I suppose; when you pick up a gangster film, you get some pleasure out of the familiar, out of knowing what you’re in for. The surprise comes from the quality of the acting, and the beauty (there’s that word again) of the film itself.

Kim Ji-woon is a fascinating director. Other than A Bittersweet Life, he’s given us the postmodern “Eastern Western” The Good, The Bad, and The Weird, the psychological horror A Tale of Two Sisters, and the wrestling-centered comedy Foul King, among others. He’s one of Korea’s directors to watch, a group including Park Chan-wook (Oldboy) and Bong Joon-ho (The Host). Korea, to my mind, put out some of the most interesting films of the last decade; here's hoping it only gets better during this one.