Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

Kazuo Hara, best known for his 1987 documentary The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (see review in this issue), helmed this strikingly personal and frequently disturbing portrait of his ex-wife Takeda Miyuki's life following their divorce. Opening in 1972, the black-and-white filmed Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 finds Miyuki and the couple's child living in Okinawa, where she begins a relationship with an African American serviceman, even though there is a serious language barrier between them. Miyuki winds up pregnant and, ignoring her family's urgings to get an abortion, moves to an apartment in Tokyo, where she gives birth—captured by Hara's camera as Miyuki lies on the floor working double duty as both midwife and expectant mother. The raw emotional power of this film—including its frank discussion of sex and race—can still shock more than three decades later. However, Extreme Private Eros has a major flaw: Hara released the film with out-of-sync sound and chunks of out-of-focus camerawork (including the birth on the floor sequence), and while the reason for this may have been artistic (a portrait of an off-kilter life presented in an off-kilter technical manner), it's nevertheless irritating for the viewer. Still, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 is an unconventional work that will appeal to fans of decidedly different documentaries, one that also represents an important milestone in the history of Japanese documentary filmmaking with its shift of focus from the social collective to portraits of individuals. DVD extras include a booklet written by Jeffrey Ruoff. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)