Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (Kazuo Hara, 1974) (Patreon)

This is a film I'd been meaning to see for years, and I finally got around to it, now that I am doing research for my upcoming Diary Film course. As it happens, Kazuo's film is not exactly right for the class, since technically speaking this is more of a 2nd-person portrait film, with the filmmaker's personal involvement in the profilmic events mostly alluded to indirectly by the people onscreen. Certainly Kazuo is more present in Extreme Private Eros than he is in the only other film of his I've seen so far, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On, which is a work of third-person political portraiture.

But there's one thing that Emperor and Extreme Private Eros do have in common. Kazuo seems to be fascinated by genuinely horrible, megalomaniacal people. In the case of EPE, it's Kazuo's former lover, Miyuki Takeda, a woman so self-involved and utterly unpleasant that watching an entire film focused on her and her choices is more of a chore than anything. Upon their breaking up, Miyuki tells Hara that she is moving to Okinawa, taking the couple's infant son with them. So Hara negotiates with her to come along, making a film of her life from what is basically a "close distance." That is, he is ever-present in her living spaces and her life, but there is no indication that the two have any real relationship any longer at all. 

And, as if to cement this non-relationship, Miyuki carries the couple's son around everywhere like a sack of potatoes, smoking and drinking around him and generally ignoring his existence as much as possible. Part of this is attributable to a hippy-punk alternative lifestyle, but near the end of the film, Miyuki admits that she does not much like her son, partly because he reminds her of Hara.

Kazuo watches as Miyuki has a fraught relationship with a woman, then takes up with an African-American G.I., all the while working is as a "bar girl," dancing topless for money and free booze. Eventually Hara's new girlfriend / production assistant, Sachiko Kobayashi, comes to Okinawa to help with the filming, and Miyuki takes every opportunity to humiliate the woman, for no obvious reason other than her relationship with Hara. 

There are some aspects of EPE which are unsettling simply because of the time and place it was made. Miyuki's second child, a daughter, is mixed-race, and this is a constant source of discussion and consternation. On the one hand, this is understandable, since the bar girls' relationships with black G.I.s are, for them, inseparable from postwar American imperialism. So there are compelx geopolitics being written on the bodies of these men and women, and the resulting children are caught in the middle. Still, when Miyuki calls her mother and tells her she has given birth to a "mixed" baby, and replies after a pause, "no, it's too late to kill it," it's hard not to be horrified, regardless of historical context.

By the end, Miyuki is so sick of Okinawa that she writes a manifesto that she tries to distribute to the other bar girls and, eventually, the men on the street. It suggests that black men are using Japanese girls and "should be castrated." The woman's Valerie Solanas turn is not entirely surprising, considering how myopic Miyuki has been throughout the film. During her natural childbirth, for instance, she refuses to pick up her newborn, or even cut the cord, because she is insistent that she must push out the placenta, however long it takes. She treats the experience as a personal achievement approaching extreme sport, ignoring her baby until she has satisfied her "goal."

By the end, though, we see a bit of growth. Miyuki has moved into a women's birthing collective, and is helping another mother give bith along with three other midwives. This is the first time we have seen Miyuki engage in cooperation, or that Kazuo has shown her subsumed within a team. So over the course of three years of observation, Extreme Private Eros moves us from A to B. And for Kazuo's part, we never get a clear sense as to why this particular woman (apart from being the mother of his son) should be the object of his fascination, or ours.