Fantastic Fest: Uwe Boll, Auteur

Investigating whether the rumors are true that the oft-criticized director of "Alone in the Dark" has finally made a good film.

Provocative subject matter is not hard to find at Fantastic Fest — genre films with a twisted, grotesque, or kinky bent is the programming’s bread and butter. But the mood isn’t always so judgmental; take, for example, the exuberant Japanese film “Love Exposure,” from director Sion Sono, a four-hour epic celebration of cross-dressing, martial arts and upskirt photographs, and of the rare sort of person who can combine all three into a single, liberating (not to mention violating) activity.

That person would be Yu (Takahiro Nishijima). Like Bill from “Rampage,” he’s a troubled young man with a bad home life who finds an unhealthy outlet for his aggression. Things begin badly for Yu when his mother dies while he’s still a child; they get even worse after his father becomes a priest, takes a secret lover, then retreats into severe depression after she leaves him. Yu’s father then insists that his son repeatedly take confession, but since his crimes aren’t sufficiently sinful enough for his royally screwed up parent, Yu takes to committing bad deeds in order to please him.

Eventually, that leads Yu to pornography and to taking pictures of women’s underwear, and to a very unusual love triangle between Yu, Aya (Sakura Ando), a powerful young crime boss, and Yoko (Hikari Mitsushima) a man-hating schoolgirl who falls for Yu while he’s dressed in drag in order to pay off on a bet he’s lost. The complex push-and-pull between the three characters echoes the symbiotic relationships “Love Exposure” explores between love and hate, religion and sin. Extremely silly at times, genuinely thought-provoking at others, and frequently both all at once, the film boasts the rare quality of looking nothing like anything you’ve seen before. It lifts up your spirit as it lifts up your skirt.

You read this description of a four-hour movie about a fighting pornographer and you’re probably wondering: does it really need to be four hours long? No, probably not. But it does need to be almost four hours, and for more than three-quarters of its runtime, “Love Exposure” flies by, only running out of steam during the lengthy and melodramatic dénouement inside a cult that has taken control of most of the characters’ lives. The sequence is crucial to the film’s themes but deadly to its previously frenetic pace and triumphantly silly style.

But flawed as its final hour is, crafting a movie as complicated as “Love Exposure” is no small feat. I didn’t hear a lot of people talking about the film in Austin — the screening I attended was the only I one I saw at Fantastic Fest that wasn’t filled to capacity — but the reaction inside the theater was intense, like being witness to a film cult at the moment of its birth. Epic in scope and ambition, it is an ode to dreaming big and wanting more, from life and from film. And in assuming people will pay to see a movie like that it invokes a very different view of the world and of the audience than the one espoused by Uwe Boll. One I certainly prefer.

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