The first thing you need to know before watching Hideaki Anno's "Love & Pop" is that it's made by Hideaki Anno. He's famous for twisting clichés and deliver heavy symbolism through visual mediums as broad as animation and on here he does it through live action filming. And wow does he succeed.
You won't see a better looking film than this, it's so gorgeously filmed with purposeful camera shots that actually bring something to the story, sometimes voyeuristic, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes POV, 100% of its time. It serves to show the busyness of every day life as seen through the lens of teen girls. It just oozes with style. Never seen a movie filmed like this with so many different perspectives!
In Love & Pop we follow Hiromi, a 16-year-old high school girl who seemingly has the perfect life. Loving parents, amazing friends, good economy, lives a safe life... despite all of this she feels an emptiness inside, a wish for a desire- something to carry her into the next era of her life, adulthood. To fill up the gaps of her own emptiness she does "subsidised-dating" a type of dating culture that has men paying girls to date them for a few minutes or hours, this is all done through the phone of her friend Nao.
She never does any dating alone (always with a friend) but when she finds out about a ring that she wants she decides to try and get the amount of money needed to buy this ring, Nao gives Hiromi her phone (which is not hers really but from a gay man). And thus we follow her walking around Shibuya, picking up calls from lonely strange men to earn that money for that ring.
The premise seems kind of strange, I'm not familiar with Japan's dating culture but have seen glimpses of it through films and animation. This movie decides to show everything about it, and it's not a very pretty picture- men who are very lonely and ill-fitted for society let out their strangest and weirdest desires sometimes by the most simplest and mundanest of stuff or sometimes by the most scary and depraved. Hideaki shows this but it never feels exploitative, it feels rather documentary in a way. A critique of the gross world of men, which somehow feels similar to his critique of "escapist otaku" culture through his anime Evangelion. Even though it's never "spoken about" it's a clear intention of the director, Hiromi is the one that experiences all of this just for the sake of having a Topaz ring- just to experience something special that her friends already have. This is another subject that the movie tackles, desire and leaving chapters of one's life behind- high school can seem so dramatic and pointless at the same time, friendships turn out to be fleeting and not as "forever" as one thinks them to be and everyone is already moving towards new horizons. This is something that pains Hiromi deeply and it's in here where we find the film's true and poetic heart. It's sad but also a very poignant way of looking at life, most high school films always see this as a happy time where you cement your bonds that last forever, but it's not like that. In fact you're at limbo, cherishing your friends and last years of innocence before you become an adult, and if you're not "moving" then you can be left behind which is a sad fact of life. Hiromi tries to find this desire, masked through the search for money to buy that coveted Topaz ring. Hiromi narrates the movie throughout, sometimes in a Socratic conversation with herself which is so interesting in how it's framed. Hideaki Anno never frames Hiromi with disdain, he does it very respectful and is very in-tune to how teenagers feel.
The soundtrack is phenomenal, charged with modern sounding pop music intertwined with classical and recognisable scores (just like Evangelion!). You can see that every aspect of the film was handled with care.
If there's anything that I would've wished the film would've done better is that some segments could've been shorter in the second half, the first half is very energetic but in the second half there's many uncomfortable and long scenes (although I understand why they're there for the plot). Also I wish there would've been more scenes with Hiromi's friends, the marketing of the movie makes it seem that the movie follows the four friends throughout the movie but truth is is that we stop seeing them after the first 40 mins or so. Once again, just a nitpick, I do understand that this is Hiromi's experience and I guess her friends being in the rest of the movie wouldn't have done the plot well.
This might be going into my all-time faves list, mainly because it made a mark on me- what an impactful movie, it certainly doesn't have what you'd call a happy ending but it's gonna leave you thinking about it. If you're searching for a happy high school flick then this one is not for you.
