Love & Pop

[Mark Schilling]

For anyone who's interested in more info on Love & Pop, here's my JT review
of the film. 

Mark Schilling

Love & Pop (1/20/98)

Produced by the "Love & Pop" Production Committee; screenplay by Akio
Satsukawa; directed by Hideaki Anno. With: Asumi Miwa, Yukie Nakama,
Kirari. Running time: 110 mins. 

Japanese animation often strives to achieve the impact of live-action film,
in everything from the explosions of the spaceships to the emotions of the
human characters, so it shouldn't come as a surprise when an animator tries
his hand at live-action filmmaking. 
     The transition from the pen to the megaphone has not always been a
smooth one, however. In his 1988 animated version of his hit *Akira**
manga, Katsuhiro Otomo created a dark future world that equaled *Blade
Runner** in its originality, unity and vividness. But when Otomo ventured
into live-action filmmaking in 1991 with *World Apartment Horror,** he
overwhelmed his story of Asian workers in Japan with the grandiosity of his
ambition. Trying to integrate wacko comedy and bizarro horror, he ended up
with a movie whose mood swings were as wide as its all-Asians-are-brothers
message was sincere. 
     Now Hideaki Anno, who soared to fame last year with the *Evangelion**
animated TV series and films that he directed, has made his first
live-action film, *Love & Pop.** As he did in his two *Evangelion** films,
Anno once again makes a lonely, conflicted adolescent his central character
and fills the screen with a blizzard of images, text and dialogue. The
influence of the anime on the film is hardly an accident; Anno began work
on his feature about high school girls tempted into the risky business of
enjo kosai (paid dates with older men) while he was still drawing his
visions of a future apocalypse and later admitted in a program interview
that *Love & Pop** is an *Evangelion** carryover. 
     But Anno also has that rare commodity in the Japanese movie business
-- a visual and story-telling imagination that is fresh, inventive and
totally indifferent to received ideas about what can and can't be done with
film. Working from a novel by Ryu Murakami, he first thought of filming
*Love & Pop** as a pseudo-documentary, but changed his mind after seeing
*Focus,** Satoshi Isaka's superb essay on media excess, filmed entirely
from the point of view of a TV documentary crew's camera.  
      Instead, he recast *Love & Pop** in the form of a day-in-the-life
narrative reminiscent of Masato Harada's *Bounce KoGALS -- Leaving,** a
sharply observed portrait of hustling ko gyaru (high school girls) that I
named as one of the ten best films of last year. Once again, we have a gang
of four sweet sixteens in minis who roam Shibuya -- the teenage hangout
zone of the nation -- casually extracting Y10,000 notes from the wallets of
strange men for services that run the erotic gamut, but rarely enter the
zone of conventional sex. 
       One of the men invites the girls for a session of karaoke, but after
the usual off-key crooning, he suddenly produces a large case, from which
he carefully extracts ripe grapes, one for each of the girls. He has them
suck and bite the grapes, just enough to break the skin, then collects,
stores and labels them as though they were precious biological specimens.
For this favor he pays the girls more than their fathers probably earn in a
week. The other men who pony up for the pleasure of their company,
including a slimily obsequious gourmet and a loudly censorious salaryman,
are just as warped and pathetic, if not as original.  
     As in *Bounce KoGALS,** one girl is in the enjo kosai hustle but not
quite of it. Hiromi (Asumi Miwa) has a special reason for being on the
game; she wants to buy a beautiful topaz ring to hide what she is convinced
are ill-shaped hands. She promises the clerk she will bring the money for
the ring before the store closes for the day and, with the help of three
friends, goes out to earn it the quickest, easiest possible way: enjo
kosai. 
     A girl from an average (if comically clueless) middle-class family who
goes to an average (if comically chaotic) girls' high school, Hiromi hardly
fits the usual sex worker profile -- and would be horrified if anyone
thought she did. 
      But she plays along with her more experienced friends' hustles, then
ventures out alone to complete the small fortune she needs for her ring
with a nonchalance that borders on arrogance. As might be expected, she
meets customers who teach her harsh lessons about the degradations and
dangers inherent in her new profession.    
     This story is last year's news. Wisely, Anno plays down its tabloid
surface, while focusing on its universal substance: the eternal erotic
dance between youth and age, money and sex. Though enjo kosai has become
the victim of media overkill, Hiromi is not a media-generated composite.
Newcomer Asumi Miwa brings a winning naturalness to the role -- she seems
blithely unaware of the camera --  while adeptly negotiating the widening
gap between Hiromi's on-top-of-it attitude and her out-of-control emotions,
including her distress at losing not only her self-respect but her very
sense of self. 
     Though Anno's treatment of his story may provoke, it is his technique
that surprises. Using a small digital camcorder, he explores every corner
of Hiromi's world, from every conceivable angle, in a giddy procession of
quick cuts. We spend much of the movie looking under tables at wiggling
feet, from inside microwave ovens at peering faces and from the floor at
the insides of passing miniskirts. 
     Anno's stylistic intent, however, is less titillation -- voyeurs will
find the movie a crashing bore -- than ironic comment on his characters and
their fragmented, materialistic, chimerical transactions. In using
techniques that may derive from cinema verite, but subvert its documentary
pretensions by their comic eccentricity, he runs the risk of producing the
cinematic equivalent of a joke greeting card. Rather than trivialize his
subject and trash his story, however, Anno's methods serve as an witty
running commentary on a world in which nothing lasts, nothing is what it
seems and the only value is the gratification of appetites that have grown
monstrous and absurd. For all its funhouse distortions, it is world that we
recognize and, more than we may want to admit, symbolizes what we are in
danger of becoming.