Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974

It is hard to write about Kazuo Hara's alarming documentary Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 without adopting a morally judgmental tone that might disturb some people.  We are told that all families, whatever their configuration, are equal; we understand that women must be accorded full control over their reproductive systems; in principle, I suppose, we are willing to salute those who dare to be different, those who are willing to risk an experimental life-style:  in Chasing Amy, the protagonist says something to this effect:  "I'm an experimental girl.  If I came with an operator's manual, no one showed it to me."  That stated, Hara's Extreme Private Eros portrays a kind of specifically female pathology, a sort of amoral squalor that is characteristically gendered and pretty much instantly recognizable  -- the film explores the uneasy boundary between behavior that might be thought to be vaguely feminist in nature, but that, also, has a decidedly perverse and self-serving character.  Simply put, the film poses the question of whether the women depicted in the movie are skanky promiscuous losers or bold sexual outlaws.  My inclination is to see the heroine and her friends as the former, but, I should note, that there are a number of reviews that tend toward the latter interpretation as well.  Everyone has glimpsed the world shown by Extreme Private Eros -- it's an entirely female world, ruled by women who live on government entitlement checks, a place where men are merely transient, unwelcome guests, generally prized, and, then, despised for their violence and sexual selfishness; in this world, no one has any money, everyone raises everyone else's children, the girls and women seem never to have heard of birth control and are all casually promiscuous, the babies have no fathers, diapers are always dirty and everyone has a grievance against everyone else.  Masculinity, of course, has its own pathologies and they are mostly violent and cruel, but the milieu depicted in unsparing terms in Hara's film is one that is terrifying to most men -- an abyss where everyone is enthusiastically making babies without any concern as to how those children will be cared for.

Hara's picture records his ongoing relationship with the rather squat and plain-looking Takeda Miyuki.  Miyuki is Hara's ex-wife and the mother of his small son.  She announces that she intends to travel to Okinawa.  Hara pursues her to that place, corners her with his camera, and films her incessantly.  At first, we see Miyuki, who is a vicious nag, verbally abusing her taciturn girlfriend.  While rug-rats creep on the floor, Miyuki belabors the other woman who ignores her, sulking as she gnaws on her fingernails.  This lesbian love affair collapses and next we discover that Miyuki has an African-American GI boyfriend, a nice-looking kid named Paul.  This love affair lasts only three weeks but results in Miyuki's pregnancy.  Miyuki hangs around low-rent bars on a squalid GI strip in Okinawa -- the various homely bar girls explain how they have been abused, beaten and knifed.  Inserting himself in this depressing situation, Hara has brought with him to Okinawa his present girlfriend, the much more attractive, chipper, and aggressively cute, Miss Kobayashi -- she sticks the microphone in Miyuki's face so that the heroine can engage in her tireless rants about her happiness that she is pregnant with a "mixed" (that is, half-black) child.  Miyuki has the baby in an alarming single-shot sequence with the camera aimed directly at her vagina -- Kobayashi holds the microphone up to laboring mother's mouth but, otherwise, doesn't help her at all; Miyuki's little boy sits next to his mother's spread knees and wails during the bloody spectacle.  (Hara is overly excited and the image is out-of-focus, something that is, I think, a blessing.)  Later, Miyuki's lesbian lover also has a half-black baby -- that kid is born very floppy with head crushed into a cone and, for a few alarming minutes, it seems that the child is not going to survive.  Along the way, Miyuki has authored a tract about the evils of prostitution -- the tract is supposed to help the hapless bargirls and warns them to stay about from "Black men with their big cocks."  The local pimps are not amused and beat up Hara for fomenting trouble among the girls.  We see Miyuki taking a bath in a tub full of infants, a grotesque kind of earth mother.  In the final scene, she is dancing naked as a go-go girl in the bar on the GI strip. 

The film is casually cruel -- apparently, Miyuki's mother suggests to her daughter that she kill the half-Black baby -- and everyone is constantly berating everyone else.  These tirades are disorienting because the sound doesn't synchronize with the image -- we hear the voices but lips don't move.  The movie is made in black and white and its intentionally shoddy -- the images are out of focus, either under-lit or over-lit.  The shabby concrete block apartments are like something from a nightmare -- you can almost smell the filth, the tropical heat, the dirty diapers and rotting food.  In one scene, Kobayashi and Miyuki discuss Hara's deficiencies as a lover -- as usual, Miyuki is warning someone about imminent trouble.  The two women are lounging against a wall.  When the camera pulls back at the end of the conversation, we see that both of them have been standing in about six-inches of nasty-looking bilge-water under a sea wall -- they seem to be literally ankle deep in crud.  The film is astonishing enough -- it's about a rough, negligent, lawless life-style and the movie is shot in a casual way that is wholly consistent with the subject matter.  The picture is about a woman who just doesn't give a shit although she has endless outspoken grievances and the movie is made in such a way as to make it obvious that the woman's carelessness is commensurate with the studied carelessness of the way the picture is produced:  it's complete poverty on all levels -- no money, no father, no income stream to support the babies and their mothers; no money to make the film and not even any commitment to getting things in focus or making the sound match the motion of people's lips. 

Hara is famous for the film he made 13 years later, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On -- the ultimate in investigative journalism.  In that film, the protagonist wants to get war veterans to admit that they encouraged cannibalism in order to survive in the jungles of New Guinea.  When the old men balk at this admission, the  hero literally beats the truth out of them.  The movie is staggering and Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 is, in its own way, equally uncompromising.