Love Exposure (Ai No Mukidashi) Review

"Even a pervert has a life history," declares epicene 17-year-old Yu Honda (Takahiro Nishijima) to fellow pupil - and girl of his dreams - Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima). "Perverts have reasons for being who they are."

As Yu delivers these assurances, he is dressed in drag as 'Miss Scorpion' (the avenging heroine from the cult 1970s Female Prisoner Scorpion movies) and struggling to conceal the massive erection that now, ever since he first saw Yoko's resemblance to the Virgin Mary (as well as her exposed panties), he gets every time he so much as thinks about her. Which is to say that he is himself a 'pervert' and a 'sinner' (his words), although perhaps no more so than any of the other characters in Love Exposure - or indeed than any of us, driven as we all are by the fragile human need for family, forgiveness and love.

Writer-director Sion Shono populates his film with kooky, if not downright unhinged, characters, but also takes the time to show us the life histories that made them who they are, starting with the first, furiously paced hour in which we see Yu go from young Catholic boy to 'ordinary high school kid' to up-skirt-obsessed 'king of perverts' - all born out of a desire to connect with his sexually repressed father-turned-priest Tetsu (Atsuro Watabe). Where Yu opts for the path of perversion, his man-bashing, kick-ass punk of a would-be girlfriend Yoko prefers the path of hatred, down which she was driven by her own abusive father (Keisuke Horibe). Sociopathic cult leader and cocaine smuggler Koike (Sakuro Ando), on the other hand, has opted for the path of deception, manipulating everyone to do her mysterious bidding, while deluding herself about her own motives along the way - and she, too, is a product of a viciously despotic single male parent.