Sightlines · reception
How Love Exposure was received
2008 · Sion Sono · Love Exposure on Sightlines
The arc
It premiered in the Berlinale Forum in 2009, where it won the Caligari and FIPRESCI prizes, and spent years as a word-of-mouth secret handshake among cinephiles; today it's one of the highest-rated cult titles on Letterboxd and routinely tops 'best films of the 2000s you haven't seen' lists.
What’s debated
The eternal debate is the runtime: is this the rare four-hour film that 'flies by' and earns every minute, or proof that Sono's maximalism needed an editor?
Its footprint
The training montage scored to Beethoven's Seventh and Hikari Mitsushima's furious recitation of 1 Corinthians 13 are endlessly clipped and quoted, and 'the 4-hour Japanese epic about upskirt photography that's actually a masterpiece' has become its own kind of cinephile pitch-meme.
Where it stands
A capital-C cult object and Letterboxd darling — the 'you must have seen this' gateway film to Sion Sono and to extreme-runtime cinema generally.
Did you know? Sono's original cut ran roughly six hours; producers pushed him to trim it, and the released version still clocks in at 237 minutes — and the story was inspired by a real friend of Sono's who was involved in clandestine 'peek' photography.