Director
Hideaki Anno
Writer
Akio Satsukawa, Ryu Murakami, Hideaki Anno
Cast
Kirari, Hirono Kudo, Asumi Miwa, Yukie Nakama, Tadanobu Asano
contact
King Record Co., Ltd.
Made in 1998, not long after the success of NEON GENESIS EVANGELION, LOVE & POP was director Hideaki Anno’s first live-action feature film. Despite already being established as a filmmaker, Anno embraced new technologies and unconventional stylistic choices to tell the story of Hiromi (Asumi Miwa) and her schoolgirl friends as they engage in enjo kosai, or “compensated dating,” where older men pay young girls for dates. Using new digital cameras, Anno seemed limited by only his imagination as he shot the film; rigging the camera to unconventional devices, adopting a rapid-fire editing style and using a full-range of distorting effects. The resulting experience is a transgressive examination of transactional desire with a style that embodies the full creative range of the underground spirit.
Set over a single day, LOVE & POP sets out to explore questions of materialism and the mundane. Hiromi’s life is repetitive and empty, and she seeks both meaning and value with her encounters with older men. The men in the film would now be known as “incels”—pathetic yearners who seek to corrupt what they cannot have. The girls seem to have a keen understanding of their power and influence over these men, and derive some fleeting satisfaction over being desired and being paid for it, but the experience becomes increasingly hollowing. What happens to people when their value is reduced to just another material thing, something to be bought and sold? As a portrait of a lost generation amidst a decaying Tokyo (the city has rarely looked so nauseating, a compliment), Anno takes a hilarious, troubling, and decadent approach to LOVE & POP, which emerges, like most of Anno’s work, as the product of a singular visionary. – Justine Smith
Showings
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