Love Exposure (Sion Sono, 2008)

The warped Catholicism of Sion Sono's four-hour epic Love Exposure is fitting, given how the director clearly seeks to kill aesthetic gods. Known in some circles for referring to Japanese legend and humanist director extraordinaire Yasujiro Ozu as, quote, "the anti-Christ," Sono clearly wants to provoke and carve out his own name. On the basis of this film alone, he has succeeded. This film chews up everything — manga, pink films, J-horror, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, the Japanese New Wave — and spits out an unholy mess so sloppy and overstretched that it can't help but work without a hitch. My unfamiliarity with modern Japanese cinema precludes me from making any sweeping statement about its greatness compared to its peers, but I must admit I haven't seen as aesthetically revolutionary and explosive a film since another Japanese work, Yoshishige Yoshida's Eros + Massacre.

Like Yoshida's stupefying masterpiece, Sono's film tells its story with an off-kilter aesthetic: de-centered compositions cant and distort the image, faces rarely fitting entirely into the frame. Sex is also central to the narrative, but in the opposite manner that it proved crucial to Yoshida's late-60s work. Eros + Massacre was informed by the sex-positive revolution against repression that played a bigger part in youth movements across the world than we are typically taught to day. Love Exposure, on the other hand, is the product of a porn-saturated, pink film-inured society where even the cartoons are doing it. If the bifurcated timeline of Yoshida's film hinged (and ultimately came apart) on the freedom to explore one's sexuality, Sono's shows a young man trying to find sense and sanity through chastity, at least until he can find his own Virgin Mary to make his wife. That he essentially wants to have sex with the Blessed Mother, who also contains symbolic memories of his own deceased mom, instantly plunges this tale of Catholic guilt beyond the realm of Scorsese and into Buñuel territory.