Fantasia 2012: Takashi Miike’s ‘For Love’s Sake’ melts brains

For Love’s Sake aka Ai to makoto aka The Legend of Love & Sincerity
Written by Takayuki Takuma, Ikki Kajiwara, Takumi Nagayasu,
Directed by Takashi Miike
Japan, 2012 Fantasia imdb

This year, Fantasia pulled out all the stops to kick off the Festival with a bang – several bangs. They unveiled a new interactive screen that displays pictures from films playing in the festival with capsule reviews in English and French, logos of sponsors and recent random tweets that mention FantasiaFest. It can become a bit of an infinite “Meow” loop, but it is still very cool.

To mark the fact that a Japanese film was chosen as the official opening film for the festival, the local Japanese consulate sent a representative and (better still) sponsored a Japanese dance and an awe-inspiring Japanese drum performance. When I say that it was a percussive assault, I mean that in the most complimentary way. The drumming may have come from the stage of the Hall Theatre, but it was almost as if they were drumming inside you, rattling your bones and liquifying your organs. It was intense from the upper balcony area; I tremble to think what it must have been like closer to the stage.

Then the film started (after a very enjoyable NFB animated short film called Bydlo by Patrick Bouchard) and things really got weird…

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