For at least three years I've been meaning to watch Extreme Private Eros, and it took one of those 105 degree days to slow me down enough to finally do the deed. In the first 15 minutes of this film I had made up my mind that Miyuki, the focus of the documentary, was a typical freakjob with severe anger management issues, but by the end of the film she had unexpectedly blossomed into a complex anti-hero on a mission. Her mission.
Extreme Private Eros was an act of love by director Kazua Hara, but also a personal cleansing in which he and Miyuki, his ex-wife, freely let us take part: lesbian lovers, barflys, G.I.'s, tittie bars, childbirths, communes...and one very broken heart. Fuck. This film was amazing. Why did it take me so long to get around to watching it?
Q: As for Very Private Eros Love Song 1974, why would you make a movie about private family life?
Hara: In the sixties and seventies, there was a feeling that if the individual did not cause change, nothing would change. At the time, I wanted to make a movie, and I was wondering how I could make a statement for change. At the time, there was much talk of familial imperialism [kazoku teikokushugi]. One of the strong sentiments of the time was that familial imperialism should be destroyed. I thought that if I could put my own family under the camera, all our emotions, our privacy, I wondered if I might break taboos about the family.
Q: Saitõ Masaharu called you a masochist after you made Very Private Eros Love Song 1974. Could you comment on this?
Hara: When the subject of my film was perceived to be stronger than I, as Takeda Miyuki [the main character of Very Private Eros Love Song 1974] was, I was called a masochist; when the subject was perceived to be weaker, I was called a sadist. Instead of being a masochist or a sadist, I would say that the nature of documentary filmmaking is that the director puts himself in various situations.
Q: How was the movie received?
Hara: Very well. One funny thing was that the birthing scene, well it seemed to be the women who felt uneasy about the scene, they sometimes got up and left. The men, however, had no chance at that time to see a baby born, so they came to see the film, and watched the birthing scene spellbound.
At that time, among men who saw the film, there were those men who thought, "My, that Takeda Miyuki is some woman," and others who thought, "I can't stand that woman." As for women who saw the film, well there were those who thought, "I'd like to do the same type of things as Takeda Miyuki," and others who thought, "Her life is not for me."
Q: The sound and picture are not synchronous. Why?
Hara: I was very poor at the time. I could not afford a camera that would do the sound with the pictures.
From Independent Film Quarterly:
In a candid document of both unvarnished honesty and emotional self-flagellation, Japanese documentarian Kazuo Hara considerably stirred Japanese society with his film Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974. The project’s subject matter is ripped from Hara’s own personal life as he examines the exploits of his former lover, an iconoclastic woman named Takeda Miyuki. Miyuki herself is a revelation and honestly too good to be true, forgive the cliché. We learn early on from Hara’s own voiceover narration that Miyuki is Hara’s estranged wife; the pair initially fell in love and married leading to the birth of their son.
However, Miyuki soon tired of being trapped in such traditional conventions and not only left Hara but took their son and took on a female lover. One of the movie’s opening salvos is a scene in which Miyuki chastises her lover and berates Hara on-camera as well. The director operates with a faux fly-on-the-wall sensibility that captures the venom Miyuki spouts towards her lover as we watch a relationship in its final throes. Hara’s overall style lends itself to this sort of unvarnished honesty yet it is anchored by considerable aesthetic concerns and methods. The out of sync sound and jumpcuts attempt to convey an amateurish, home movie, visual tone yet the director also intercuts various intertitles which provide background and commentary towards the action itself along with Hara’s own voiceover narration. The result is both intimate and visually fractured; a home movie made by an Abstract Expressionist it feels life.
Miyuki is unapologetic about her actions and emotions, seemingly unable to lie or play to the camera for sympathy. Attempting to breakthrough strait-jacketing social mores, Miyuki attempts to live a life in systematic defiance of the rules and expectations her culture places upon her. After the breakup with her lover, Miyuki next begins an affair with an African-American GI which leads to her becoming pregnant with his child. In a scene which still shocks today, not only due to content but open honesty, Hara films the actual childbirth from beginning to end recording the quicksilver swell of emotions from physical pain to emotional joy. Hara captures it all with an unblinking eye and lays it on the table for the viewer to either watch or avert. Overcome with joy, Miyuki contemplates her life with this new child only to contend with her mother’s racism during a phone call in which Takeda clearly does not take kindly to the suggestion of killing her mixed baby.
Yet while Hara attempts to keep a certain degree of personal distance to the proceedings, he is constantly brought to bear upon the film as apart of this world, not merely recording it. One of the film’s more amusing yet biting subplots involves Hara and his own producer/sound recordist Sachiko Kobayshi whom we learn is having an affair with Hara at the time. Takeda slices mercilessly into the young girl, berating Hara at every point and constantly pointing out his shortcomings while the director keeps her face clearly in frame to speak such words. It would be easy to accuse Hara of cynical opportunism here, on the one hand he’s being depicted as some sort of distant whoremonger yet it churns out great footage loaded with drama so why would you turn the camera away? Whether he’s attempting to play himself up as a humble observer or subtle opportunist is left for the viewer to judge but it is a point that’s worth considering.
Yet despite his own involvement in the various narrative episodes that comprise the film’s overall arc, Hara wisely keeps the camera focused on Takeda herself and the fascinating and uplifting journey she makes. Moving from rather solipsistic motivations to becoming increasingly active socially, her journey from angry individual to sociopolitical radical is more captivating than most Hollywood and indie scripts that are written today. From leaving Hara she starts a daycare center for prostitutes’ children, distributes pamphlets to women working the streets leading up to working in a feminist commune and stripping in a local GI bar to earn a living. If this story were picked up and produced by Hollywood, you’d have a feel-good, awards season tale. The greatest shock and pleasure of it all is this actually happened and still has the power to shock and provoke decades later.
Technical Information:
Title: Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974
Year: 1974
Country: Japan
Director: Kazuo Hara
Source: DVD5 retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 3.46 GB
Programs used: DVD Decrypter, ImgBurn
Video Bitrate: 4560 kb/s
Resolution: 720x480 4:3
Audio: DD 2.0 Japanese- 4800 Hz @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: None on source
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