Reviewed by Peter Debruge

What’s the new Takashi Miike movie doing at Outfest? For the uninitiated, Takashi Miike is the most unpredictable director working today, the gonzo poster boy of Asian extreme cinema whose bloody, over-the-top ideas defy imagination — precisely the quality we jaded, seen-it-all-before film critics cherish most in movies: the element of surprise (which in Miike’s case is putting it mildly). Outfest, of course, is the country’s second-oldest gay and lesbian film festival, turning 25 this year. Needless to say, it is not a forum where Miike’s fans might ever expect to find one of his movies.

And yet, there’s nothing the director does better than defy expectations. His latest (to reach Western shores, for the man is every bit as prolific as he is provocative), Big Bang Love: Juvenile A, ranks as Miike’s artiest film yet. Based on the homoerotic manga Elegy for Boy, the movie mixes episodes of modern dance, fantasy and animation with a rudimentary prison intrigue that unfolds on a Dogville-like set — that is to say, on stages not even remotely intended to resemble an actual prison, where the walls are sometimes nothing more than chalk outlines.

Miike embraces the artifice, which heightens the question of whether the jail itself actually exists — or, for that matter, what to make of the rocket ship and Mayan pyramid that Jun (Ryuhei Matsuda) spies just beyond the electric fence. We meet Jun kneeling over the body of a fellow prisoner, Shiro (Masanobu Ando), his hands around his cellmate’s neck. This wouldn’t be the first time the shy young man had killed someone. Jun, who worked in a gay bar on the outside, was arrested for ruthlessly beating another man to death (the violence these men use to suppress their homosexual natures becomes the central theme of Big Bang Love). Both Jun and Shiro were incarcerated on the same day, and from that moment the fixation began, a tender — albeit doomed — attraction embodied by a lone butterfly.

Though Miike is best known for his shocking imagery — who can forget the shy Japanese bride torturing her husband with acupuncture needles and piano wire in Audition or the pregnant mother giving birth to a full-grown man in Gozu? — Big Bang Love remains relatively tame. We see blood in both Jun’s unforgiving crime scene and, later, in a poignant visual metaphor, as Jun cups his hands over his heart, while blood stains the front of his baggy yellow shirt — outfits that look more like monks’ robes than standard prison attire (a crucial detail in the movie’s amber-hued ambiance). But we never see sex, which should come as a relief to skittish viewers who don’t mind the ultra-gore but would prefer not to witness any more Brokeback Mountain-style rutting.

Big Bang Love is a poem from the last filmmaker I would have thought capable of poetry (after all, this is the same director who spelled out the title of his film Ichi the Killer in semen). Jun and Shiro’s star-crossed romance echoes the prison stories of celebrated queer novelist Jean Genet and, by extension, Todd Haynes’ lovely Poison. If the film were ever to be remade by Hollywood, Shiro might be played by Colin Farrell. Tough and tattooed (though the body art comes and goes in scenes, sometimes making it tricky to identify which character we’re watching), Shiro goes looking for fights, brawling as if to prove his masculinity. With no clear motive, he sticks up for the effeminate Jun in the prison cafeteria, the closest thing to an act of love contained in this vexing movie.

Because the movie unfolds out of order, the tragedy of Shiro’s death precedes all else, and even though Jun is found choking the corpse, we have reason to share the warden’s doubts that he is in fact responsible. Everyone has reason to hate Shiro — he lashes out in bursts of unprovoked violence, he drove the warden’s wife to suicide and he refuses to have sex with the other inmates. The film separates gay sex from gay love, a distinction that makes more sense in prison than it does in the outside world (remember, however, that this “prison” may only symbolize the constraints society puts on its central couple). In jail, virtually all the prisoners engage in carnal relations of some sort, but a deeper bond exists between Jun and Shiro, an opportunity for companionship that is ultimately cut short.

The mystery shapes up to be the weakest element of the movie, although Miike manages to spice it up by injecting crazy filmmaking devices, including a surreal one-sided Q&A with a chief suspect. The entire experience is likely to frustrate anyone who resists the movie’s hypnotic charms, seeking instead to understand precisely what is going on. Big Bang Love certainly feels far different from anything else Miike has directed, mellower in many ways, and yet psychologically explosive for those who allow themselves to get lost in its strange, repetitive rhythms. Some sequences repeat as many as three times, their context and meaning evolving as new layers of the story unfold. It is an astonishing achievement, beautifully lensed by Masahito Kaneko (who, as far as I can tell, has no other cinematography credits to his name). For some, such material may seem like the ultimate stunt from a director who refuses to be categorized. To me, it ranks as the most mature and satisfying work of Miike’s career.