I think the appropriate reaction to watching or, more accurately, experiencing this film is WTF? No, seriously… WTF???!!! Basically, it’s a 4 hour absurdist epic about love, sex, religion, family, and… the ninja-like art of upskirt photography. I pity the fool who tries to provide a plot synopsis, so hopefully you’ll do the same for me. Yu Tsunoda is a young teenage Catholic in Japan where his father, Tetsu, becomes a priest after his mother passes away. One day, a neurotic woman named Saori shows up at the church and falls in love with Tetsu who tells her he can’t get married. Eventually, Saori leaves and Tetsu becomes despondent. This provokes Yu to start committing sins just so he can have something to confess to his father; but Yui’s a good, normal teenager who finds it hard to even kill an ant. Eventually he falls in a with a gang of hoodlums and finds the ultimate sin which no priest can be apathetic about; those of lust of sexual perversion. Yu trains to become a master upskirt photographer and when he admits this to his father he finally gets a reaction out of him.

Meanwhile, Yu is also out looking for his “Maria” (Virgin Mary) that his mother wanted him to find and marry. After losing a bet and dressing up as a girl with a black hat and trench coat, Yu stumbles into that girl named Yoko. Yoko is a badass who hates all men and actively looks to beat them up. This eventually gets her in trouble in a scene where’s she’s surrounded by men out to get her. Yu as the lady “Miss Scorpion” or Sasori steps into help and Yoko becomes obsessed with him, thinking he’s a she. Yoko happens to live with Saori – the same woman who left Tetsu. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, a cult leader of the “Zero Church” named Aya Koike is stalking both Yu and Yoko, developing her master plan to bring both into the cult. Both Aya and Yoko have pasts which featured abusive men, and Aya seems to lead a multi-layered life outside the Zero Church which even includes running cocaine through customs (I guess we shouldn’t ask how this is the least bit possible for a teenager).

If it sounds weird from the descrïption, it’s much weirder in actuality. On the box one critic calls it a “Japanese eroto-theosophical answer to the allegorical journeys of Jodorowski”. The comparison isn’t far off, but Jodorowski was always much more obviously surrealist and symbolic. Love Exposure actually contains what could be called a semi-traditional love story wrapped in layers of satirical, surrealistic, absurdism. Discussing the film on typical standards of narrative, acting, characters, direction, etc. doesn’t seem as if it would be particularly enlightening because the experience of it is something that quite transcends these things. The simple fact is that through it’s near 4 hour runtime I was never, ever sure of what direction the film was going to take. It starts off as a fairly sad film about spirituality and loss, develops into a satire about the perversity of Japanese pornography and “hentai” and ninja films, again develops into a bizarre love story about obsession, lies, sexuality, and childhood traumas. Somewhere it takes another turn for the bizarre down the road of religious cults, hyper violence, and long takes with Yoko quoting Corinthians 13.

It’s one of the most difficult films I’ve ever tried to review if only because the tone is so all over the place. At times it’s outrageously funny; especially Yu’s “training” to become a master upskirt photographer. At others its deliciously over the top, such as when Aya tries to break her incestuous father’s erect penis off, but decides to take an enormous pair of scissors and cut it instead resulting in a fountain of blood. But perhaps most shocking outside of these extremes are the moments that somehow manage to be genuinely moving and beautiful, such as when Yu abducts Yoko from the Zero Church and attempts to bring her back to reality. When she tries to escape him, he catches up with her on a beach and she eventually pins him to the sand and with tears in her eyes quotes Corinthians 13; a Biblical passage having to do with faith, hope, and especially love: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”

This isn’t to say the film is perfect. In a film this audacious, daring, and ambitious there are bound to be moments that don’t work. In fact, I don’t really feel the film merits its length. There are plenty of superfluous scenes, too much repetition that adds very little to the film (such as the multiple scenes of Yui doing the ninja upskirt shots), some bits that just seem tonally flat, repetitious, too over the top, or generally unnecessary to the film as a whole. This would’ve been better as a 2.5-3 hour film instead of 4 hours. But given how much of it does work, and given how out-there it is it’s hard to harp on its flaws. The film also offers a smorgasbord of interpretive breathing room; especially with its archetypal and allegorical treatment of sex, religion, perversity, obsessions, and social satire. It’s an undeniable rich film which, to its merit, doesn’t preach or seemingly “say” anything specific. It’s rather remarkable given the enormity of the subjects that it seems to stay focused on the bizarre narrative and characters to the very end. The bottom line is that the film provides an experience quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen in film and certainly something that seems utterly alien in modern cinema.