46-okunen no koi (2006)

Director:

Takashi Miike

Writers:

Ikki Kajiwara (novel) &
Hisao Maki (novel) ...

Release Date:

26 August 2006 (Japan)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

An unknown future. A boy confesses to the murder of another in an all-boy juvenile detention facility...

Plot Keywords:

Murder | Violence | Homosexuality | Dead Boy | Police Detective

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Ryuhei Matsuda	...	Jun Ariyoshi
Masanobu Ando	...	Shiro Kazuki
Shunsuke Kubozuka	...	Sumio Yukimura
Kiyohiko Shibukawa	...	Makoto Tsuchiya
Jo Kanamori
Ken'ichi Endô
Renji Ishibashi
Ryo Ishibashi	...	Warden Tsuchiya
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Shirô Kazuki
Sohi Paku	...	Prisoner 'A'
Jai West	...	Deranged Prisoner

Also Known As:

4.6 Billion Year Love (International: English title) (informal literal title)
Big Bang Love (Singapore: English title)
Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (International: English title)

Runtime:

Japan:85 min | Argentina:85 min (Mar del Plata Film Festival)

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Certification:

Singapore:M18 | Argentina:18 | Italy:VM14 | USA:Unrated (DVD rating) | Japan:PG-12

Company:

Eisei Gekijo

A Mind-Blowing Agent For the Viewer To Perceive On His/Her Terms, However Confined To the Film's Implications

This voyeuristically expressionistic film is set in an unknown future in which Ryuhei Matsuda plays a soft, sad gay bartender imprisoned for his strange and brutal killing of a customer who attacked him, and Masanobu Ando is a Yakuza thug packed to the top with pent-up anger and violence that makes him tight as a drum till he sporadically bursts. The two arrive in a juvenile detention center on the same day and, with nothing in common, they become tangled by yearning, shared visualizations of flight to an imagined world, and a murder of another boy inside the stockade that results in one dead and the other pleading guilty to the carnage. It's a murder mystery of young incarcerated men in lust, seen through surreal composition on sets of darkness and illumination and the simplest trace of detail.

Two detectives try to expose the indictment. "Why did this trigger it?" One of them questions as to why the inmate would lead this course of self-ruin and devastation, seeing a rainbow. "Only he himself knows." In the humankind that judges people under the duplicitous laws prearranged as a result of a perversely archaic edition of religious principles, Miike bares violence in its most honest form, as an instinctive undertaking. It cannot be made clear further than the surface of palpable means of interaction. It's too mysterious and puzzling for anyone beyond of the person perpetrating the action to entirely grasp. Sexual friction and short-tempered violence propel the story to its mind-blowing outcome.

Takashi Miike puts his heart and soul into his fascinating visual actualization of the morally ambiguous story, which is heavily reminiscent of Jean Genet novels like Our Lady of the Flowers. It is avant-garde theater translated onto film, voice-over and screened words as the literal point of view of the investigators. The film is punctuated by wonderful, infectious closing music, and you realize you have just experienced film-making in a unique manner, a conspicuous trance consisting of definite colors alive in the bounds of a vast universe of an unlit void. Thick with striking images like pyramids, a classic sci-fi rocket ship, and an opening dance sequence coming unexpectedly. That's just the tip of the iceberg to all of the creative dexterity Miike affords the viewer.

One may come from this film thinking that it wasn't about the story. That's an understandable way to put it, put it is not quite correct. Really, in order to be a narrative at all, it can only be about the story, but Miike does not betray the sheer weight of the story's content and ideas. Can there have been a simpler depiction of it? The film, essentially, is about existence. It is a concept spanning 4.6 billion years! Miike, who normally makes cynical if not outright self-deprecating microcosmic yakuza and horror movies, has aggregating all of those impressions into a claustrophobic, life-refracting prism of all the world's details and creates a blemish on the face of the world of cinema that audaciously, patiently, calculatedly tackles humankind and the self-worth behind which it hides, self-worth largely created by the belief in God, which this film could be read as implicating doesn't exist. The movie's likely metaphors for evolution and faith have very telling differences in outcome, as the movie's symbolic image of evolution augments and that of religious conviction remains the way it has since the beginning. The movie is only an agent for the viewer to perceive on their terms, however confined to the film's implications. Miike is correct: This is his masterpiece.