BIG BANG LOVE, JUVENILE A (Japan, 2006)
US Premiere
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84 minutes, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles Watch [the trailer] on YouTube. |
Showtimes: THU June 28, 7:00pm at the IFC Center [Buy Tickets]; |
What the - ? Just when you thought you had Takashi Miike all figured out he runs you over with a movie like this. Based on a gay manga, Elegy for Boy, this flick kicks off with an aggressively experimental Q&A session between an old man and a kid, explodes into life with an experimental dance performance, and then settles down to tell the story of two men who meet in prison, fall in love and then murder one another. There’s also a rocket ship and a Mayan pyramid. Knocking the audience off balance in the first ten minutes, this flick starts making sense when we see Jun (Ryuhei Matsuda) bending over the freshly-strangled corpse of his jailhouse lover, Shiro (Masanobu Ando), and then it carefully reassembles the shattered scenes of their lives to create a mosaic portrait of how they got to this point. Jun worked at a gay bar before murdering a man who got too fresh, Shiro is a fist-slinging bad boy who can’t stay out of the slammer, and who takes Jun under his wing in prison. The story veers off in all directions, but what lingers is its beauty: a slashing rain, a gorgeous sky on fire, a CGI butterfly and the drop dead beautiful Masanobu Ando (Nightmare Detective, Drive) and Ryuhei Matsuda (Nightmare Detective, Izo, Gohatto) bathed in golden light and trying to find something in this fallen world that will set them free from their tormented pasts. A provocation, a poem, an elegy for lost boys, a ritual for passing into manhood, a Lars von Trier experiment in style – BIG BANG LOVE, JUVENILE A is all those things and more. By the time you reach the ending you’ll understand everything...even the rocket ship. But maybe not so much the pyramid. |
Co-presented with Japan Society, as a part of |
"Big Bang Love deconstructs a Genet-like fable of murder and seduction. Set in an unlikely prison (of the mind?) adjacent to (why not?) a rocket ship and a Mayan pyramid, the narrative takes second stage to mad Miike's cosmic visual imagination. The title isn't a reference to jailhouse orgies but the origin of the universe; the picture makes a beguiling use of negative space, everything pitched, literally and metaphorically, at the edge of some fathomless void. Big Bang Love joins Gozu and Izo in the Miike pantheon of hard-edged ontological essays pushing at the limit of representation." 