Love Exposure (2008) **PART 1** directed by Sion Sono

This movie is one of the craziest trips you'll ever take and (oddly) one of the fastest four-hour movies you'll ever see.

We'll watch it in two parts on Tuesday and Wednesday at Pretlow Library, with the outside possibility of bleed-over into our Thursday event at Richard Tucker Library. (I think we'll finish before that though.)

Have to content-warn folks about a couple very gory scenes and a (somewhat offensive) section of the movie in which up-skirt photography is postulated as a martial art.

Runtime: 3 hours, 57 minutes
Synopsis (via MIFF.com):
Clocking in at just under 240 minutes but never skipping a beat, visionary filmmaker Sion Sono (Suicide Club, Noriko's Dinner Table) presents an epic love story peppered with religion, perversion and martial arts.

After being forced to confess his sins by his priest father, high school student Yu embarks on a spree of wrongdoing, becoming a ninja-like master of sneak-photography - taking photos up girls' skirts. Yu's world is knocked even further off-kilter when he meets Yoko - a man-hating riot girl - and gets involved with a mysterious cult.

Sion's masterwork is a one of a kind - an iconoclastic, scattershot action-comedy-romance.

“Evoking an unhinged Ken Russell on a sushi binge.” - Variety

"Exhibiting astonishing dexterity, Mr. Sono shapes all this trauma into a narrative that's completely coherent and surprisingly touching, never more so than in Yu's struggle toward sexual maturity." - The New York Times

"Would the film be easier to take in a more condensed form? Of course it would, but then it wouldn't be the singularly overwhelming oddity that it is." - Los Angeles Times