Love & Pop (1998): As Resonant As Ever
You know a movie is bound to be true, tragic and supremely f*cked up when it’s adapted from anything written by Ryu Murakami. Love & Pop is one such film.
Directed by the maestro, Hideaki Anno, celebrated and revered for his work on the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise, Love & Pop, released in 1998, a year after The End of Evangelion. It is his first live-action film and as sharp of a left-turn from his earlier work as anything could possibly be. Love & Pop is about a group of four high school girls who indulge in “enjo-kosai” or compensated dating, which is a type of teenage prostitution. The protagonist, Hiromi, wants to buy herself a topaz ring and her life turns dizzyingly dangerous turns as she tries to obtain it. The movie deals with paedophilia, sexual perversion, and prostitution and its VR documentary-style filming offers a glimpse into the seedy underbelly of Tokyo, where strangeness and danger lurk around waiting for the perfect victim. Many movies (Shoplifters, Cure, Hana-bi, Suicide Club etc) and documentaries (Tokyo Girls, Predator etc) have explored this “dark side” in different capacities. But Love & Pop stands out for a variety of reasons. A major reason is the cinematography itself, Takahide Shibanushi, the cinematographer employs a first-person POV that makes the whole movie feel like a VR experience, like a humble, melancholic coming-of-age Gaspar Noe film. This fluid motion style is made possible with the use of handheld digital cameras which sets the tone of the film. More than just a stylistic choice, this technique is poignant because the viewer is allowed to see things the way the protagonist does and all the dizzying, rapid camera work forces the viewer to embody the confusion, disorientation and lost-ness of a teenage girl. Movement is a big part of the film, there are long shots, close-ups, strange angles, and the camera spiralling in and out of frame, leaving one with the feeling of eavesdropping in on a stranger’s conversation, or of being at the mall, taking in the presence of hundreds of passing strangers. The background score features Erik Satie, Debussy, Mozart, Bach, Chopin and Liszt. The almost entirely classical score makes several scenes playful, morbid and darkly funny.
Another reason is that the movie says much about Japanese culture, the state of the economy and the “lost generation” of Japanese youth through a deeply personal coming-of-age story of a teenage girl and her friends.
Children are the most vulnerable and helpless class of citizens in our world, they’re entirely at the mercy of the adults in their lives, and they have no choice in how they live or what happens in their lives. This fragility is fertile ground for all kinds of exploitation. Being a teenager is an immensely lonely and confusing time and this transitional period between girlhood and womanhood can pose many threats as girls learn to navigate a terrain of balancing desires, perceptions, expectations and their burgeoning sexuality. Very often, young girls are made to feel like their sexual capital is the only reliable asset they have; a way to get attention and make “easy money” or both. In an age where teenage girls make a living as influencers online, often sexualising themselves and benefiting from it, Love & Pop is as relevant as ever. Female sexuality has always been lucrative and that’s exactly what Hiromi decides to capitalise on when she takes a liking to a topaz ring she sees at the store. It seems naïve, to prostitute yourself to buy a ring but for a teenage girl, this is an exercise of ownership and control. It’s her malformed attempt at asserting herself and obtaining something with her own merit. Her friends have hobbies, and interests and are making choices that lead them in a certain direction, Hiromi feels directionless and lost, so the topaz becomes her raison d’etre. She is not sexually curious in the slightest and as we see, she’s the least interested in the enjo kosai experience among her friends. But being fifteen, she does not know of any other way to obtain her desire. The movie ends on a bizarre yet bittersweet note, with Hiromi and her friends walking away from this world. One of the scenes I found the most touching was perhaps also the most disturbing. At the love hotel, one of her customers attacks her and tells her that he had planned on killing her and raping her corpse but decides to let her go and berates her for choosing to put herself in this position, that her existence and her body is more valuable than “this”. It’s heartbreaking to think of how worthless a person must feel enduring these experiences and how no goal or desire justifies this kind of suffering.
In the broader context, the movie can be viewed as a scathing critique of capitalism and consumerism, where naïve teenagers go out with pedophiles to make pocket money to buy things they don’t need. This rings especially true in the 2020s where most young people can’t dream of ever owning a home. So they spend mindlessly and make the most out of their present with no regard for the future because perhaps nuclear armageddon or climate disaster will wipe everybody out anyway. There are no “good jobs” or “respectable jobs” now, they’re just jobs that vary in degrees of exploitation. In some ways, everybody is like Hiromi, doing things they don’t want to do, enduring humiliating, torturous experiences to reach some elusive goal.
