The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Utterly breathless, fluttering from exuberant to devastating to giggly in both form and tone.”

Sarah Fensom, Screen Slate

Anime icon Anno Hideaki followed up his big-screen Neon Genesis Evangelion do-over (well, before the Rebuild retcon anyway) with Love & Pop, his first foray outside of animation. Demonstrating, almost defiantly, that live-action filmmaking needn’t curtail imagination, Anno’s radical adaptation of a novel by Audition author Murakami Ryu brandishes a physics-defying employment of rule-free cinematography—its images an idiosyncratic ping-ponging of DV footage shot from every inconceivable place a digicam can go. The frenetic formal approach serves an introspective story (shades of Evangelion existentialism writ large) about four high-school girls who make money ​“sugar dating” much older men in Shibuya. Anno doesn’t shy away from the pedophilic association—and acute dangers—of this Japanese phenomenon, setting teenage protagonist Hiromi down an increasingly debased path when a luxury topaz ring catches her fancy. Practically unseen in North America apart from a long out-of-print DVD, Love & Pop has garnered much fanfare with this new restoration and theatrical release.

In Japanese with English subtitles

Advisory: Love & Pop includes a scene of sexual violence.

“A transgressive examination of transactional desire with a style that embodies the full creative range of the underground spirit … [It] emerges, like most of Anno’s work, as the product of a singular visionary.”

Justine Smith, Fantasia Festival

“Anno’s transgressive shot-on-video opus formulates a coda for the turn of millennia—a point-and-shoot testament of youth languishing in the perpetual disarray of Japan’s lost decade.”

Japan Society (New York)