Takashi Miike has one hell of a publicist. Back home in his native Japan, Miike is considered no great shakes. He is but one of dozens of daring, innovative genre filmmakers, but by no means near the top of that crowded heap. But over here, well, that's another story altogether. Here, Miike is a name, and he gets all the love while contemporaries like Masyuki Ochiai, Norio Tsuruta, Ataru Oikawa and others struggle for recognition. Miike has behind him an unholy alliance of fanboys and serious critics-critics, mind you, who otherwise would not be caught dead giving a thumbs up to some tawdry horror flick.

So when Miike makes a pronouncement like, "This is my masterpiece," people over here are going to sit up and pay attention. It's the sort of bombast an artist should probably avoid--"masterpiece" is a designation that posterity bestows, not a prize one can claim for one's own ego-but Miike wants you to know he's decided to play for higher stakes.

Like Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Miike started off making fairly ordinary genre pictures, increasingly indulging in wicked satire and outrageous pulpy violence. He balanced his interests in thoughtful character development and wry critiques of modern Japan with more conventionally commercial notions of extreme gore and anarchic humor. When the Western press embraced Audition as the cinematic equivalent of sliced bread, it emboldened him to give in to his more experimental instincts. The fanboys may still come to Miike looking for crazy action and exploding heads, but Miike has decided to start taking them on a different sort of ride. Big Bang Love, Juvenile A picks up some of the notions previously explored in Blues Harp (the film formerly identified as his masterpiece), but married to the aesthetics of the Theater of the Absurd.

For a film whose premise is a homoerotic romance set in a prison, Miike has studiously avoided the obvious, the cheap, and the cliché. The prison itself is not so much a set as an abstraction-the architect appears to have run out of ink and paper before he got around to designing the usual attributes of a prison: cells, bars, walls. The inmates are forbidden contact with the outside world. Adding to that sense of dissociation is the fact that the prison is smack dab between an ancient pyramid (said to be a stairway to heaven) and a rocket ship. In other words, it is between the past and the future. This is how the warden (The Grudge's Ryo Ishibashi) wishes his charges to view their incarceration as well: as a way station from which they can either fall backwards into the criminal lifestyle of their past or move forward into a brave if uncertain future.

Two prisoners arrive on the same day, strangers to each other thrown into the same cell. Ariyoshi Jun (Ryuhei Matsuda) is a sensitive young man whose job as a bartender at a gay bar ended when he brutally hacked apart a regular customer-partly a response to the man's unwelcome advances, but a sign of some deeper untamed beast within Ariyoshi. His cellmate is Kazuki Shiro (Masanobu Ando), a repeat offender with a penchant for unprovoked attacks. A bond forms between the two, more romantic than sexual, and more spiritual than romantic. When the guards find Kazuki dead, and Ariyoshi straddling the corpse shouting "I did it!" they find they have a mystery on their hands. This is no open and shut case, and determining what really happened and why will involve unraveling a complex web of relationships.

Told in a non-chronological jumble, in which memories and dreams and hallucinations are mixed together and replayed over and over with subtle alterations in perspective and context, Big Bang Love is as confident a work of experimental storytelling as anything served up by David Lynch, Christopher Nolan, or Quentin Tarantino. For a film as daring as this, AnimEigo's DVD presentation is suitably doting. The film is given its own platter, to maximize bit rates on the lushly colorful and detailed transfer. The subtitles go beyond the usual, not only translating the dialog but sometimes offering onscreen footnotes clarifying cultural or linguistic moments for the non-Japanese viewer. An entire second disc of extras provides a 40 minute long mini-documentary on the making of the movie, accompanied by a 20-minute interview with Miike. The director's interview, like his movie, starts off impenetrably incoherent and oblique, but the patient viewer will be rewarded by thoughtful insights into the difficulties in translating the unorthodox novel by author Hisao Maki (written under the pseudonym Masaki Ato) into an equally maverick motion picture.

For more information about Big Bang Love, Juvenile A, visit Animeigo. To order Big Bang Love, Juvenile A, go to TCM Shopping.

by David Kalat