Yeah, okay, there all sorts of movies about love and Catholic shame and spiritual crises and parenthood and trauma and martial arts and maybe there might even be a handful of movies about taking sneaked pictures of women's panties. Sure, okay, I accept that premise. But how about all of them things at once? How about we don't short any of these themes and ideas and make the movie four hours?

Yeah, you goddamn right Love Exposure has the biggest brassiest balls in all of cinema.

Maybe this movie wasn't worth four hours of my life. I don't know. It has made me reevaluate what's considered "worthy" in life. Because this movie is awesome. I have no idea what to make of this particular combination of perversion and shame and love and redemption. because I don't know what to make of LIFE ITSELF and LOVE EXPOSURE is LIFE ITSELF.

There is no way this movie should be coherent. It barely is*. The protagonist gets traumatized into becoming the best panty photographer in Japan as a way of finding true love. He becomes a prophetic figure among some group of like-minded perverts and clashes with a cult that is ill-defined aside from being a cult and falls in love with an agent from the cult who basically asexually seduces his family away from him and and and and whatever. Oh and also she thinks he's a woman because he was crossdressing on a lost bet. Because of course.

There are martial arts fight scenes and some crazy gore. There's a kidnapping/hostage scene on a beach that ends with the kidnappee screaming a Bible verse at her kidnapper. This is a movie that goes deep into detail about how one becomes the best panty photographer in Japan, but does not define the cult that drives the story beyond it being a cult that wears all white and everyone seems happy. It's a mess, but dammit I have to believe that everyone involved invested fully into this because there's no way to plow through this material otherwise.

Stylistically, it's like a rainbow erection. Colorful, but kind of hard to look at for so long. I'm envious at its sheer ambition, ignoring the haphazard execution. The budget was either small, or they realized they had four hours of movie to shoot so spaced out the bags of money accordingly.

This movie makes my feminist leanings, my Catholic upbringing, general perverted perspective and my love of shit that just go for broke all slam up against each other. My brain is percolating with thought bubbles that pop before they get filled with words and stick figures. I cannot emphasize the length of this movie enough because it's not like a pensive movie that focuses on 20 minutes scenes of high tension, like INGLORIOUS BASTERDS; this is a movie that jumps from crazy idea to crazy idea and basically can ONLY end in an insane asylum. Don't be fooled by the "chapter" breaks. This isn't a novel. This is five different novellas from five different authors in a blender and spat at you with a big shit-eating grin on its face.

Is this an artistically successful movie? I don't know. After watching this, I don't even know what "success" is. I don't think I came away with a greater understanding of The Human Condition or a better appreciation for women's undergarments or the value of a spiritual life. I feel like I endured being a bit player in another man's fever dream. I feel like I got thrown around a tilt a whirl in a Streets of Rage game. I feel like my perception of reality was drugged and made to do a burlesque dance for a room full of mannequins.

Elvis Costello once wrote regarding his album SPIKE that he had "in mind the blueprint for five different albums, decided to make all of them." This is the filmic equivalent of that album, but that one didn't have a pornographic premise that didn't deliver on actual nudity. It wasn't as violent or thematically obtuse.

I give this movie 5 stars. I give this movie an F.

*LIKE THE VERY NATURE OF LIFE