And now from Takashi Miike - the acclaimed director of cult horror and social satire AUDITION and ICHI THE KILLER, we get BIG BANG LOVE - JUVENILE A. Catchy title that. And yet that's about as acccessible as this homo-erotic J-thriller gets. BIG BANG LOVE is set far in the future - a future that looks like a Tate Modern sculpted version of today and features a cast almost exclusively populated by beautifully sculpted young Japanese men, moodily lit in ochre and red and shot intimately on Super 16. The plot has more than a hint of noir. Two men are put in prison for unrelated crimes. One is a gay bartender whose frenzied attack on a sexual predator was too gruesome to be classed as self-defense. He forms a crush on another inmate - an ueber-violent youth who raped the prison warden's wife. The rapist is found strangled and the bartender confesses. But who really did it and why? The plot may be simple, if not entirely comprehensible - check out the final murder motive! - and moves in circles around itself. The dialogue is similarly eliptical to the point of obfuscation. Added to this you have the odd sequence of modern dance and a lot of the prison scenes look like they have been blocked out on a theatre stage. In short, this is not a movie designed to be accessible and as much as I enjoyed the surreal visuals and sheer beauty of the framing, after a while I grew bored. The 85 minute run-time seemed like forever.BIG BANG LOVE opened in Japan this summer.
I can understand why you would feel this way about the movie, after all, the way you detailed it, you missed the entire point of the movie. You have no idea what is actually going on in the film.
ReplyDelete