Fantastic Fest 2009: ‘Love Exposure’ Review

Today I saw the four hour long Japanese saga about sex, love, violence, death, religion and most of all… panties. Yes that’s right.. a four hour long film about all those things and so much more. When I heard that there was a four hour film from Japan about a self proclaimed pervert that loves to take photos of girls panties without them knowing, I had to sit through it, luckily it was my favorite movie of the festival to date.

I’ve been struggling on how to write the synopsis of this film and it simply won’t come out. The words can’t be formed because of how crazy the film is. I can tell you that it has panty ninjas, gang fights, religious cults, kidnapping, rape, sex, erections, penises being cut off and quite a bit more, and while that all sounds crazy, it all works.

The biggest worry some one can have about a fil i like this is that it’s going to be boring, and that’s just not the case. The pacing of the film is incredibly sharp and makes it very enjoyable. There isn’t a boring moment in the entire thing.

If I were to tell you how the movie starts I’d tell you it’s about Yu, a teenager who’s father is a widowed catholic priest, who starts seeing a woman. This relationship goes on for a while, but eventually the woman leaves him and Yu’s father changes from a very loving and warm person into a very scary guy. He starts forcing Yu to confess his sins every day and when Yu doesn’t think he can have any to confess he starts to lie to his father. When that doesn’t work he starts to go out of his way to sin and that becomes his hang up, his thing, his turn on. Yu is obsessed with sinning by any means necessary in order to get his father to show some interest in him. That’s literally a 10th of the story and it just gets so much more insane from there.