By Takashi Miike, the man behind so, so, so many weird action flicks looks to be back at it with his upcoming work premiering at the Cannes Director’s Fortnight, First Love.
The film, which HanWay will handle worldwide sales of at Cannes, has put out its first official synopsis, and it sounds like a blast: Across one night in Tokyo, a boxer named Leo falls in love for the first time with a call girl and drug addict named Monica. She unwittingly becomes a part of a drug smuggling operation, which sees the two pursued by a yakuza, his nemesis, a corrupt cop, and a female triad assassin. Their paths are all set to cross in “spectacular Miike style, at his most and fun and anarchic.”
That sounds like exactly what I’d want.
I think filmmaking is a drug for Miike. He has over a hundred directing credits to his name, and most of the time it seems he’s working to make the films look and feel like drugs, too. Perhaps best known for the bonkers, bloody, and kinky Ichi the Killer, his most successful movies seem to lean on his idiosyncratic ability to just be weird as hell. With films like Gozu, the Dead or Alive trilogy (the first film ends with all of Japan being blown off the map), and Yakuza Apocalypse, he’s a man who truly appreciates film’s openness as a platform for just being crazy and violent.
And I truly appreciate his appreciation of that.
Though he’s made plenty of films that aren’t insane, First Love sounds like it’s my favorite version of Miike at work, and I can’t wait to learn more as details are drip fed from Cannes.
‘First Love’: Details Revealed For Takashi Miike’s Cannes-Bound Action-Thriller With RPC & HanWay [Deadline]
