hello & Love & Pop

[Mark Schilling]

Brian Dunn asked for opinions on "Love & Pop." Here's the revised Japan
Times review that appears in my book "Contemporary Japanese Film."

Mark Schilling

Love & Pop (1/20/98)

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

 Hideaki Anno, who scored last year with his cult hit "Evangelion" animated
TV series and films, has made his first live-action film, "Love & Pop."
Once again Anno 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) while he was still drawing his visions of a future
apocalypse and admits in a program interview that "Love & Pop" is an
"Evangelion" carryover. 
	But Anno also has that rare commody -- a visual and story-telling
imagination that is 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 documetary crew's cameraman.  
	Instead, he recast "Love & Pop" in the form of a day-in-the-life narrative
about a gang of four sweet sixteens in minis who roam Shibuya 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
obligatory crooning, he produces a large case, from which he carefully
extracts ripe grapes, one for each of the girls. He has them bite the
grapes, just enough to break the skin, then stores and labels them as
though they were biological  specimens. 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.  	
	One girl, 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 a typical (if comically clueless) middle-class family who goes
to a typical (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 earn 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. 
  
	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 almost 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. 
	Anno's treatment of his story may provoke, but it is his technique that
dazzles. 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 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 blatant eccentricity, he risks 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.