HENTAI LAB

THE ARTIST

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 13:08:00 -0400

“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”-Jay-Z

PARADE VS. FUNERAL

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:47:00 -0400

by Steven Boone

There is a scene late in the film FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES (1969) that might be the perfect HENTAI LAB specimen. Leaving her apartment, breathtakingly beautiful crossdresser Eddie (drag performer Peter) stumbles across a student protestor lying wounded in a stairwell. She takes him into her apartment and dresses his wounds. He tells her about the police brutality he suffered, and why he puts himself at such risk for the cause of liberation. This brief, almost throwaway scene expresses the unlikely bond between these two strangers.

In writer-director Toshio Matsumoto’s translated DVD commentary, he explains:

“On the one hand, we have a young guy who’s involved in the current student activist movement and on the other, we also have a gay youth who wants the right to live as a gay man and transform himself. They are poles apart, yet linked conversely by their similarity. This chance meeting between these two characters, both social outcasts, gave me the opportunity to introduce some supporting roles in the plot to symbolize this generation who didn’t fit into society and who opposed the inflexible cultural system of the times.”

At first, I had trouble with Matsumoto‘s terminology. He constantly refers to Peter and the character Eddie, as “he.” My problem with that was, well, just look at “him”:

My eyes had trouble agreeing with Matsumoto‘s assertion that his own film is about a “gay youth” when Eddie and “his” friends are clearly determined to live as women full-time.

FUNERAL PARADE, which borrows from Oedipus Rex to explain Eddie’s ultimately tragic circumstances, at first seems to offer more pity and sensationalism than true empathy. It has moments of slapstick ultraviolence that reportedly inspired Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE adaptation.

So why does this film leave me so haunted and impressed? (It is currently threatening to go on my top 20 of all time.) Maybe because Matsumoto includes so much of the “real world” in his creation that it bursts free of his elaborate but stifling conceptual framework. Into a “shattered glass” non-linear structure he describes as Cubist, Matsumoto inserts interviews with the film’s actors and real-life social outcasts, including the “gay men” this film labors to cloak in humiliation and tragedy. A blunt, antagonistic off-camera interviewer seems on the hunt for pitiable answers…

…but what stuck with me was how brave and determined these people were to be themselves in the face of social scorn.

even the ones who seemed a bit lost.

Likewise, in contrast to Eddie and her romantic rival, Leda (Osamu Ogasawara) both of whom grew up in the shadow of abuse and neglect…

…the actors who portray them seem to be happy, well-adjusted folks.

Yet, Peter’s onscreen testimony exposes prejudices and hangups in my interpretation.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think about the hero?

PETER: He and I have something in common. His father leaves him as a child. His way of living resembles mine. His character, too.

INTERVIEWER: His character? Do you sympathise with him?

PETER: Yes. But not in terms of incest, or things like that. But I do understand him.

———————-

So, Peter uses “he” as well. Was my sexual preference presenting a barrier to (or a condition for) empathy? What if the actor playing Eddie wasn’t so beautiful and feminine?

While the actors seem a lot more comfortable with the male pronoun than I assumed, FUNERAL PARADE’s avoidance of the term transgender (though “transsexual” comes up in one interview) and uniform reference to these people as “gay men” seems just as limiting as insisting upon “she.”

Oblige Matsumoto a bit of freak show condescension in his approach, because his ambition is quite vast. The film passes through various corners of the counterculture with a touch of satire.

The drug scene.

Anarchists and student demonstrators.

Drag nightclubs.

Underground filmmaking.

The art world.

Free love.

There’s even a heavy-handed (but no doubt provocative, for 1969 Japan) erotic episode that connects Eddie’s trauma with that of a black G.I. fresh from Vietnam.

“The boundaries between male and female are blurred. This is just one symbolic glimpse into this world, but so many boundaries
are broken in this world where boundaries are not delineated at all. To a certain extent we are shown how everything is jumbled or mixed together. Thus, one sees the problems that this can create.” —Toshio Matsumoto

Matsumoto‘s wide net brings up so many riches of observation and beauty that I trust the vibrant storytelling before the somewhat cynical storyteller. More than the hippie panorama, it’s the found poetry and intimate details that make this film worth cherishing as something greater than a cultural relic.

The main storyline that Matsumoto cuts up and scatters about concerns the love triangle between club owner Leda and Eddie, her much younger, highly popular hostess. They are both in love with, or at least desperately attached to, a no-good smuggler named Gonda (Yoshi Tsuchiya). He tells each lover what she wants to hear.

The rivalry between Eddie and Leda, which recalls another mythic touchstone, Snow White…

…comes to boil as Leda starts to lose her ground with Gonda, who gaslights her into a frenzy.

The girls have a catfight in Manga-style comic panels and CLOCKWORK ORANGE-style time lapse.

The tone shifts constantly in this film. Scenes where Gonda and his lovers attempt to communicate with each other through means other than sex are as grave as a funeral:

In one closeup that stops the world, Matsumoto records the slow and spectacular breaking of Leda‘s heart after Gonda has told her she’s over the hill, too much trouble, and of no further use to him.

What makes this moment hard to shake, besides Ogasawara’s performance for the ages, are memories of the tenderness Gonda lavished on Leda in earlier scenes.

A gentle kiss on the forehead can be more emotionally binding, more potentially devastating than a full-on lip-lock. Matsumoto, for all his air-tight conceptual spiel and lack of sentimentality, evokes this basic understanding in various sublime images of lovemaking. This is the spiritual side of “erotic.”

The action is often so abstract that such notions as gender and sexuality evaporate in the intoxicating moment.

What matters is that two human beings offer each other comfort in some stolen corner of a chaotic and treacherous world. What seems so ephemeral may actually stand (in our collective memory) long after politics and wars and the lofty concerns of high art.

Yeah.

Let’s come down to earth for a moment, and return to that catfight. There is something sad about this petty burst of violence, but when you slow it down, you find Peter and Osamu laughing their asses off in every frame.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see a documentary on these two crazy actors? What ever happened to Osamu Ogasawara? Did he live much longer than his tragic character? IMDb lists only FUNERAL PROCESSION under his name. We know that Peter is still alive today, with numerous film and TV credits, including Akira Kurosawa’s RAN (1985).

Maybe one of the last barriers to true empathy is our capacity to imagine, and fervently hope for, a person’s freedom and happiness, no matter how alien they appear from our perspective or how great the odds piled against them. There’s a lot of bleak foreboding and tragedy in FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES, but what makes it so valuable to me are the moments it shakes loose from all that shit, convulsing in fits of joy and light.

(Psst… check it out. )

CORPORATE...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 02:59:00 -0400

CORPORATE HENTAI Possibly the most perverse video we will post on this page. Unilever corporation lures ordinary women into a deserted loft, then forces them to confront their own natural beauty. Sick, SICK. The following quote from Dove, on the other hand, is perfectly acceptable: “Only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful.” If the remaining women are to be believed, that means we’re stuck with 6,694,788,896 ugly broads. No wonder there’s so much unrest in the world.

SPRING LICKERS

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:32:00 -0400

some scattered notes by Steven Boone

Harmony Korine’s SPRING BREAKERS is a tongue-kissing cousin of Chris Cunningham’s classic Aphex Twin music video, WINDOWLICKER (1999). Each work’s vision of sublime, sun-kissed idiocy and hedonism seems to pour from the same wellspring of champagne and bodily fluids.

The blaring dubstep music that gives SPRING BREAKERS its comic buzz sounds like a less inventive descendant of Aphex Twin’s syrupy cocktail of digitally processed voices, instruments and ambient textures.

Cunningham’s clip adds a touch of surrealism you’d expect from Korine: The jiggling video hoes are all, from the neck up…

… grizzly-bearded clones of Aphex Twin himself.

Korine’s possible response to that cognitive grenade is a scene where corn-rowed gangster Alien gives his bikini-clad teen proteges “blowjobs.” The girls shove their loaded automatic pistols into his mouth and stand up so that the weapons project at crotch level.

In each case, the symbolism is as juvenile as it is powerful. Cunningham’s is more nightmarish, more feverishly beautiful.

Endlessly repeated mantras (“I don’t give a fuck!” in WINDOWLICKER; “Sprang braaake forevuh!” in SPRING BREAKERS) and visuals (Korine’s bikini girls in hot pink ski masks; Cunningham’s bikini girls with monster faces) become hypnotic, like a series of Buddhist koans improvised by an imbecile.

SPRING BREAKERS darkens the dreamscape by introducing GRAND THEFT AUTO-styled graphic violence; WINDOWLICKER does the same via unsettling creature effects. It’s a whimsical darkness.

These two films by different creators, separated by 14 years, seem as intimately linked as The ATL Twins, a pair of reptilian henchmen with the same demonic grin Aphex Twin sports in WINDOWLICKER.

It’s as if Korine and Cunningham woke up from the same Wigger wet dream-turned-nightmare and rushed to interpret it, each in his own drunkenly lyrical fashion. Alien’s mantra “Spraang Brake fo-evah…” seeks to erase the distance between the post-everything now of SPRING BREAKERS, the pre-millennium tension of WINDOWLICKER’s 1999 and all the mindless flesh fairs that preceded them, enshrining an experience even older than the phrase that puts it so perfectly, “Young, dumb and fulla cum.”

Cunningham and Aphex Twin, meanwhile, just want to mess your mind up for all time.

HENTAI MASTER

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:15:00 -0400

by Steven Boone

Yasuzo Masumura directed 58 films in a blazing, bursting career, but I had to stop after seeing only two of them, to catch my breath.

LOVE FOR AN IDIOT (1967)

and MANJI (aka ALL MIXED UP) (1964)

In these two hilarious, achingly sensual and sorrowful masterpieces, themes of obsessive passion, co-dependency, toxic power relationships and sexual politics play out in frames that are really cages.

Wong Kar-Wai could have watched only MANJI to get the visual template for his 2046.

The cluttered, lived-in production design looks like William Chang’s work on WKW films.

But none of it is for arty effect here. Not one geometric shadow, off-center composition or dash of color is wasted on frivolous aestheticism. Everything pulls together to describe the trap that these characters have lowered themselves (or stumbled) into, writhing in pain and ecstasy.

Characters pursue their elusive objects of desire with exponentially increasing obsequiousness, dishonesty and self-pity.

Their “love” is all mixed up with pragmatism and survival. A critique of the post-WWII capitalist scramble is as powerful here as in any film that Douglas Sirk made the previous decade. In Sirk’s melodramas, made for a victorious nation, the appraisal is implicit; in Masumura’s potboilers, made for moviegoers of a defeated empire, it’s explicit.

The performances might appear over the top for their intensity and volume. But anyone who has suffered an emotional breakdown/withdrawal is likely to recognize Masumura as one of the keenest directors of actors in cinema history. In the same year that she gave a feverish performance in WOMAN IN THE DUNES, Kyōko Kishida gives a volcanic one in MANJI.

There’s also a touch of Juzo Itami-like kinky absurdity. I could imagine Itami, who once acted in Masumura’s A FALSE STUDENT, drawing inspiration from his mentor 20 years later for A TAXING WOMAN and TAMPOPO—particularly the screwball energy of LOVE FOR AN IDIOT:

So, comparisons abound. Yet there is no flow of images quite like Masumara’s. He seemed to live by Kurosawa’s maxim of visual dynamism, tending to move the camera only when motivated by the subject’s movement in the frame, but with something like Kaneto Shindo’s or Kihachi Okamoto’s sense of desperate urgency. His cuts scream.

A second unit director for Kenji Mizoguchi and Kon Ichikawa early in his career, Masumura is considered one of those missing links between the Three Masters (Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Ozu) and the Japanese New Wave. In Masumura’s universe, the elegant formalism of the former meets the radical social criticism of the latter.

Well, that’s what I got from watching just two of his films, anyway. Several names have come up in the fruitless debate over who deserves to be called the Fourth Master. Masumura is already my choice simply because of the way these two films end, resolving towering emotion and acidic irony in a single, breathtaking visual masterstroke. One ends in bottomless despair, the other in perverse bliss, but both sing the same song: There is simply no surviving modern life without love, and no happiness in it without a downright worshipful appreciation of beauty.

OUTLIERS

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 21:57:00 -0400

from a review of THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A PORNO GANG by Steven Boone

Despite all the blood and degradation and scraping by in “Porno Gang,” the most astonishing act of cruelty is a verbal one. The porno gang is a coarse bunch, but its members are generally mindful of each other’s feelings and space. The outside world offers far less consideration: At one point, the gang’s version of an MVP, a plump amazon who’s probably more inspired and daring an actress than Marko’s girlfriend, suffers verbal abuse from beady-eyed cops at a stationhouse. They say she’s fat and ugly and desperate for sex. Over here in the West, a media-indoctrinated viewer might be inclined to disagree with the cops only on the matter of style. Of course she’s fat, of course she’s ugly, but don’t use these facts to torment the poor girl. But Djordjevic’s camera shows us how robustly beautiful she is, not much more than average size, with a sweet, luminous round face. Whether it was his intention or not, this is Djordjevic’s most radical visual statement in “The Life and Death of a Porno Gang,” evidence that the outliers society tends to purge or render grotesque by economic exclusion are often the only truly beautiful people in sight.

Full review here.

HUNTER/DANCER

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 09:59:19 -0400

by Maciel Marquez (excerpt)

…, I couldn’t help myself, but to constantly exclaim things like, “Oh shit! Dancer in the Dark is the same exact movie as this, but in opposite!” & other similar surprised expletives.

When I reached the ending I was truly convinced Lars Von Trier holds Hunter very close to **his heart, and realized Dancer was a sort of Yin & Yang ode. (Or just a very clever ripping off technique.)

There is nothing more applaudable than a filmmaker taking a favorite film and making their influencing material all their own, especially very creatively (think Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein), and in this case, Trier makes Night of the Hunter themes of abandonment, innocence vs evil, gynoangst/stupidity vs strong woman, lies vs hidden truths, compassion vs selfishness, prey vs parent, and lastly, preservation vs sacrifice his very own.

Read the full essay at

Soeur Lumière

Obedience School

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 01:38:25 -0400

by Maciel Marquez

“DOGTOOTH” was generally reviewed & described as having themes about “over protection” & secularism and some even said it was a statement about Greek society.

What Iclearly continue to see (because I keep going back to Yorgos Lanthimos’ films), is a theme of abuse & power and what happens before, during and after. Other prominent themes of his are: Control, blindness, incest, neediness, subservience, hiding, disrobing, detachment, confusing, substituting, gross indifference, repetition, repeating longing scenarios & cathartic/ritual performances. Your typical ingredients for a Greek tragedy.

Mainly, Lanthimos’ films are magnificently composed & well lighted tales of functioning dysfunctional dynamics. The characters are mistreated individuals, whether by life circumstances or some weird dichotomy in some group or family. The fact he accomplishes all of these complicated even surreal worlds in a very subtle blase way,only demonstrates the evolution of a powerful auteur. In Lanthimos’ films every shot is literally an extension of his complicated characters.

Continue reading at

Soeur Lumière

Manga grandmaster Osamu Tezuka’s short PUSH is a far more...

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 20:48:24 -0400

Manga grandmaster Osamu Tezuka’s short PUSH is a far more immersive, imaginative and entertaining piece of sci-fi than the trillion dollar PROMETHEUS.

SLINK

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:30:00 -0500

by Steven Boone

DEMONLOVER would appear to be a perfect film to post on a page called HENTAI LAB, since it involves corporate espionage at a Japanese company that produces hentai (really silly adult animation).

But, as I mentioned in our first post, we’re not here for that. We mean “hentai” in the Japanese slang sense: weirdo. Strange, sensual and visually stunning movies go here.

Though this 2002 flick about corporate espionage and web 1.0 at its delirious tipping point now seems more dated than a Roger Corman biker flick (with the simulated Internet and New Media visuals pushing for sensory overload, little suspecting how much exponentially crazier such technology would get in the near-decade since this film’s release)…

… whenever Assayas uses the real world and not computer screens to create excitement, DEMONLOVER is as inspired and exhilarating as anything in his masterpiece, IRMA VEP.

Rain drops on windows, second-skin catsuits, tipsy handheld cameras following women up to no good down dark passageways…

Ambient noise music by Sonic Youth deepens the sense of atmosphere—in this case, one area where Assayas was years ahead of the aughts arthouse trend indulged by director-composer teams like John Hillcoat/Nick Cave (THE PROPOSITION), Jim Jarmusch/various (THE LIMITS OF CONTROL), Nicholas Winding Refn/Sunn O))) (VALHALLA RISING) and David Fincher/Trent Reznor (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATOO).

His slinky, cat-burglar-of-the-future visual style could have benefited such needlessly top-heavy films as AEON FLUX and INCEPTION.

Speaking of top-heavy, Assayas seems the kind of guy who could keep his eyes fixed on a woman’s cleavage without missing a word of what she’s saying. Dialogue and sound design handle expository duties while the camera ogles like a construction worker.

Despite a boring fetish for bondage scenarios and indoor smoking (this might be the smokin’-est flick since the heyday of film noir), DEMONLOVER’s imagination soars when capturing ordinarily mundane gestures and interactions. Its mysteries don’t add up to much, but its transitional images are an ode to bob-cuts, dark rooms and devious women on the prowl.

DROOL

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:52:00 -0500

Jeremiah Kipp is one of those visionary low-budget filmmakers who isn’t stuck in the 20th Century. Like Davids Lynch and Cronenberg early in their careers, he conjures up phantasmic worlds out of human expression—and human body parts. But his digital-age resourcefulness is something entirely new.

I could post a lot of brilliant short films Kipp has made recently but chose DROOL because Hentai Lab is all about men, women and cinematic eye candy. Be advised, this particular candy has an acrid scent and a strange, medicinal aftertaste.

Kipp made this crazy thing with an artist’s collective called Mandragoras Group. The music is by Aphex Twin—which reminds me of another short-form maestro who used AT music with great inspiration, Chris Cunningham. But Kipp is on his own bizarre trip. —Steven Boone

MACHO EXTORTION

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:41:00 -0500

by Steven Boone (images by Conrad Hall, A.S.C.)

The second most costly hostage held by the powerful in order to guarantee your full compliance with destructive policies is your self-esteem. (The first is your security.) What fuels self-esteem varies between individuals, but it’s possible to profile groups roughly according to their confidence triggers. Among a group of educated ~~hipsters~~, for example, the trigger might be one’s ability to project flippant irony and intellectual seriousness simultaneously. Failing to meet a particular group’s unwritten standard of poise and mastery puts you out in the cold. There’s no love out in the cold.

For macho men, the trigger is simple (but not easy): to be (or be perceived as) the most suave, commanding and potentially lethal man in the room. The macho man has a lot of models to draw from, but arguably the richest source is the past century of Hollywood movies.

The military, the police and corporations recruit by appealing to this basic insecurity, of course, promising a macho diploma in exchange for killings, errands and purchases. Movies simply provide the seductive iconography. It’s impressive, with all the ways the Macho Deception has been deconstructed and mocked in the past 50 years of pop culture, how many millions of men it continues to extort with images of masculinity threatened and defended.

I call ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE (1973) the greatest American studio film of the 1970’s for hundreds of spectacular reasons, but above all for the way it deconstructs and mocks the Macho Deception without humiliating the deceived. It’s as if producer-director-composer James William Guercio decided there was already enough shame and cruelty in the air; why manufacture some more? Guercio has nothing but empathy for the lonely males in this modern-day Western written by Robert Boris.

Eleven years after John Ford used THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE to take stock of masculine codes embedded in Wild West lore, Guercio chose to shoot many iconic ELECTRA GLIDE scenes in Ford’s signature location, Monument Valley.

But Guercio ventures where Ford, a studio craftsman, wouldn’t dare, into the mess that macho extortion makes of one’s love life. Imagine becoming a stooge for Authority in order to attract the kind of woman who just loves a man in uniform, only to somehow find yourself denying your relationship just to avoid stepping on Authority’s toes. Just to preserve your career. In one of the saddest and loveliest film scenes of the 1970’s, diminutive Native American motorcycle cop-turned-detective John Wintergreen (Robert Blake) and his John Wayne-like superior, Harve Poole (Mitch Ryan), come face to face with their shame, in the form a heartbroken barmaid.

They reveal a kind of cowardice worse than anything an Army deserter might do.

Powerful institutions do this to us, if we let them. Their calculated enticements can pervert a relationship into a tangle of bribes, threats and transactions. You might laugh at how this shakedown turns macho men into flexing, posturing monkeys, but the same distortions are at work in all other social scenes. A friend of mine once said it all, observing some professors engaged in a vicious intellectual pissing match: “Yo, these dudes show off their knowledge the way young thugs back in our old neighborhood flaunt their sneakers.”

American rugged individualism might be a real thing. I imagine it’s partly what brought us through certain pivotal historical moments on the noble side of the issue at hand (slavery, women’s rights, desegregation, etc.). But when film, television and advertising projected this idea of individualism as stock images that even the most aimless conformist could wear like a regulation football jersey, its meaning became inverted.

ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE is about shedding the uniform. At first, Wintergreen, who likes to inform the ladies that he’s the same height as SHANE star Alan Ladd, longs to shed his patrolman blues for detective brown and beige. Eventually, no uniform can do anything for his stature or protect him from a violent American legacy. It’s up to him.

If all this sounds as heavy-handed as a crabby New York Times reviewer once made it out to be, let me stress that Guercio packed the film with warm, improvisatory humor and local color.

Best known as the producer of the rock band Chicago, he cast rocker, roadie and hippie friends as weary survivors of America’s post-Woodstock counterculture crackdown.

Old cowboys, flirty girls, rumpled detectives, fading retirees and hard put working men fill out Guercio’s canvas.

The director sacrificed his own salary in order to afford master cinematographer Conrad Hall, who dapples the canvas with smoky shadows and sugary highlights that turn potential cliches into solemn visual poetry.

And then there’s the breezy, funk-scored motorcycle chase that the creators of CHiPs must have studied. This is one of the few scenes Hall didn’t shoot. The playful groove tells us that poetry’s temporarily on hold while we celebrate the “wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun” of a classic American chase sequence.

With its low-budget genre movie flourishes and tenderly observed conflicts, ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE is a protest song, an appeal to those of us considering paying the ransom. You are better than that, it cries. It’s from 1973, but, as America’s decline accelerates, to a chorus of opportunistic Tweeters and snarksters, aggravated by antiseptic and demeaning corporate images, it’s right on time.

VIDEO: NOTES ON THE GREATEST AMERICAN FILM OF THE 1970’s

A PERVERT'S GUIDE

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 03:25:00 -0500

by Steven Boone

Hentai means “pervert” or “weirdo” in Japanese. It’s the kind of thing you shout at somebody you’ve just spotted feeling up women on the Tokyo subway. It’s a badge of shame.

In Sion Sono’s LOVE EXPOSURE (2008), Yu (Takahiro Nishijima), a virginal high schooler, finds himself labeled hentai after several misguided attempts at provoking his aloof, perpetually grieving widower father, a Catholic priest. Since Dad is also, strangely, the boy’s father confessor, Yu figures confessing to some truly outrageous sins will make Dad care again. He starts running with a street gang. Each week, he dutifully reports every street fight and petty theft in the confessional. After a disastrous affair with a flighty woman breaks Dad’s spirit anew, none of Yu’s “sins” can break his zombie-like state.

Yu’s pals convince him to up the ante by joining a ring of upskirt panty photographers.

Among 100,000 other things, LOVE EXPOSURE is about Yu’s rise in the porn biz as the “Prince of Peek-a-Panty”—a stealth photographer of ladies’ underwear in public. His work involves flinging a camera on a retractable cord between the legs of unsuspecting female passersby and snapping the shutter.

Yu honestly believes this “sin” will startle his father out of his ascetic stupor. He accepts every insult and injury in pursuit of this goal—including being called, by every upstanding citizen who discovers his occupation, “Hentai!!!!”

As Yu comes of age in a cruel, hypocritical adult world and meets Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima), his first love (while, for reasons you’ll understand only when you watch the film, he’s dressed as a girl), it becomes clear that he’s a hentai not because he sticks cameras up skirts but because he loves, openly, earnestly.

—————————————————————————————————————

Today, almost no one dares to say, “I love you.” It has to be, “As a poet would have put it, ’ I love you,’ or some kind of a distance. But what’s the problem here? I claim that when the ancients say, ‘“I love you,” they meant exactly the same. All these distanciations were included. So it is we today who are afraid that, if we were to put it directly—“I love you”—that it would mean too much.—Slavoj Zizek

—————————————————————————————————————

Trouble is, Yoko is the product of sexual and emotional abuse. The only men she does not despise are Kurt Kobain and Jesus Christ. She even picks fights with men in the street—and wins.

In fact, Yu meets her while she’s in the middle of demolishing a street gang.

Even so, he loves Yoko with a purity and devotion that pose a threat to the machinations of church, state, big business and high school: When Aya (Sakura Ando), the drug-dealing teen leader of a Scientology-like cult named the Zero Church…

attempts to convert Yu and his father in order to lure hordes of troubled Catholics, a domestic war begins. Aya wants to seduce and destroy Yu.

Just like Yoko, Aya is the product of sexual abuse. She uses her precocious skills as a power broker to exact vengeance upon the world for her shattered psyche. Secretly, she desires Yu as strongly as she despises and envies his purity.

Meanwhile, Yu’s friends among thugs, delinquents, pervs and pornographers revere him as a troublemaking, moneymaking badass, but his true motives are beyond their comprehension.

All he wants is to love and be loved. His mother’s death when he was very young left a lifelong void that his devoted but remote father could not fill.

Yoko appears to be to the saintly “Mary” type that his deeply religious mother promised would come along one day.

He’s also applying some professional advice from his Peek-a-Panty sensei to his love life:

Aya is determined to eradicate any possibility of romance between these two. She seduces Yoko and charms Yu’s father before exploiting their insecurities to install herself as the family’s spiritual guide. (In a knot of plot twists that you’ll find preposterous out of context, Aya exposes Yu’s secret hentai life at his high school, orchestrates events so that Yoko ends up being Yu’s virtual stepsister and steals his drag alter ego in order to make Yoko fall in love with her, not Yu.)

Aya’s use of surveillance and duplicity to infiltrate a family makes a great metaphor for the way our institutions maintain power in the Facebook era, through calculated “frenemy” gestures.

Though the “hentai” label alienates everyone in Yu’s life, he keeps to his conviction that love will ultimately power through the web of lies. The final hour of this nearly four hour movie punishes and rewards his moral determination as powerfully as the ending of SANSHO THE BALIFF burnished a son’s faith in his dead father’s teachings about compassion.

In America, Hentai refers to Japanese pornographic animation, the kind where tentacle beasts ravage petite, big-breasted nymphets. There is no such animation in LOVE EXPOSURE, but its goofily operatic, hyperkinetic, plot-mad style is straight out of mainstream anime.

Despite sitcom-broad satire and a style that seems to encompass Nicholas Ray, Richard Lester, Nikkatsu gangster and taiyozoku flicks, DRAGONBALL Z and Shohei Imamura’s THE PORNOGRAPHERS, LOVE EXPOSURE is ultimately wrapped up in the fate of its characters, not empty spectacle or provocation. Its great special effect is allowing folks we’ve written off as losers, sociopaths or deviants to emerge as something a lot harder to judge or dismiss. Certain of these twists made my heart explode.

This web page is called HENTAI LAB in tribute to LOVE EXPOSURE. HENTAI LAB will not examine subway gropers or filthy cartoons. We embrace the term here because poet-filmmaker Sion Sono put it to such sublime use in his masterpiece, sticking up for those of us who dare to love passionately in a world that runs on fear, hostility, greed and manipulation. We are the true perverts, without shame. But there is a price to pay.