BIG BANG LOVE, JUVENILE A (Japan, 2006)
Directed by: Takashi Miike
Starring: Ryuhei Matsuda, Ando Masanobu
“Screened in the Panorama section of this year's Berlin Film Festival, Big Bang Love, Juvenile A has called forth comparisons to Godard, Von Trier, Lynch and other auteurs, which is largely deserved.” – Mark Schilling, Japan Times

 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, flick then 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 fractured scenes of their lives to create a mosaic portrait of how they got to that 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.