The New York Asian Film Festival ran from June 30 to July 16. For more information about what you missed, click here.
Love and Other Cults is a deeply odd title for what turns out to be another in a long line of ‘What Has Happened To Our Children?’ movies, wherein the candy coated mask is pulled off and the wayward depravity of today’s youth is revealed for all to see (see also: Destruction Babies). And the opening line implies a love story where none truly exists. But it’s that particular misdirect, and an eccentric sweetness at the film’s core, that make it feel unique and original.
The film starts as the story of Ai Shima (Sairi Ito), who goes by many names over the course of the film. A young girl in desperate need of belonging, we first meet her in the guise of “Yoko the Legendary Slut,” who acts as a honey pot to lure hapless teenage nerds into the clutches of a gang of teenage scam artists.
Ryota (Kenta Suga), who starts out as a pawn of one of their scams before proving his mettle by turning on his fellow suckers, finds himself immediately infatuated with Ai and spends the rest of the movie trying to free her from an existence it’s not entirely clear she wants to escape from.
The work of hyperproductive filmmaker Eiji Uchida (who has four films coming out this year alone), something about Love and Other Cults puts one in mind of Sion Sono, and not just because of their shared prolificacy and the crossover in terms of casting (several Sono regulars do a turn here, including Ami Tomite [Tag, Antiporno] and Denden [Cold Fish, Tokyo Tribe]).
There’s a similar anarchic emotionalism and a determinedly offbeat vivaciousness that mark both their works. For while the outline of the film is typical ‘Doomed Youth’ lamentations, it’s the offbeat details in which the film differentiates itself from the rest.
For instance, the title comes from both Ryota’s undying love for Ai, as well as being a reference to her background, which involves a capriciously religious zealot of a mother and her past as the worshipped acolyte of a cult leader named Lavi (Matthew Chozick, practically oozing benevolent smarminess through his pores). Never quite played for laughs, her life as a cult member is perversely played as the happiest time in her life, the time at which she is most accepted and most at peace. And the journey to find some kind of replacement for the sense of community leads her down some very dark paths…
However well Ito sketches out the chameleon-like Ai, she’s hardly the only interesting character here. While Ryota doesn’t do much but brood and pine (and play straight man to a funnier than it sounds running gag where everyone he meets quizzes him about his knowledge of his classmates), his partners in crime steal scenes from him left, right, and center.
As his closest friends, Juri and Kenta make for an intriguingly odd couple: Juri (Kaito Yoshimura), the Yakuza obsessed gutter punk who talks about various gangs and killers like he’s ironing out the details on his Fantasy Football league; and Kenta (the monomonikered Antony), the burly enforcer who is too smart and too inherently decent to be seduced by the lure of Yakuza life, but who may already be in too deep.
Antony, one half of the comedy duo Matenrou, makes for a fascinating character in this, his film debut. Half black and half Japanese (which, refreshingly, barely seems to be an issue for any of the characters in the film), his Kenta is a gentle giant, towering over all of his friends and distractingly providing the muscle for the harebrained hustles. He seems to engage in their foolishness for lack of anything better to do, which changes when he befriends a beautiful young scuba diver that takes a shine to him.
His half-in, half-out leadership of the crew doesn’t sit well with Juri, who has the foolish criminal ambitions of a guy that watches too many gangster movies, dangerously mixed with the youthful ignorance not to realize the consequences of his actions.
Yoshimura, who with his roles in both Dawn Of The Felines and the aforementioned Destruction Babies has to take the crown for most represented actor of the entire festival, does yeoman’s work in going from annoying prankster to would-be badass, while always keeping the sense of loneliness and betrayal bubbling just underneath the surface.
But in the end, it all comes back to Ai, rocking her Crocs and her Playboy tracksuit, and on a constant search for some place to call home. Where she finally ends up, and how by the skewed logic of the film it counts as a happy ending, is just one of the many turns that makes Love and Other Cults worth watching.
