An excerpt from the booklet essay by Ela Bittencourt

Director Kazuo Hara’s documentary Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 follows the story of the director’s ex-partner, the outspoken twenty-six-year-old radical Japanese feminist Miyuki Takada. While navigating the relatively new terrain of their breakup, Miyuki is also politically invested in challenging traditional conceptions of women’s roles at home and in Japanese society. The film is a documentation of Miyuki’s attempts to articulate her erotic desires, as well as of her quest for individuality. However, given the fraught relationship between filmmaker and subject in Extreme Private Eros, the documentary does not just revel in self-discovery, but also betrays a growing sense of disconsolation. While it is ostensibly a record of Miyuki’s life - presented in her voice via a series of monologues and in snippets of conversation - we are also made aware of Hara’s point of view. The sense of intimacy stems from their three-year relationship, but is also tinged with a sharp competitiveness, as the two struggle for creative authorship of the work. Over time, Miyuki asserts her own centrality, and her radicalism lies not only in her confrontational tactics vis-à-vis Hara, but also in her deep sense of the film as a stage - and as a record of her sexual rebellion.

We begin in 1972 with a crisis: Miyuki leaves Hara and takes their young son to Okinawa. The opening sequence of black-and-white portraits shows a pregnant Miyuki, her newborn, and then together. The smiling images belie the relationship’s abrupt ending, which Hara glosses over cryptically in a voiceover, saying: ‘a lot of things happened.’ From the start, when Hara finds Miyuki in her new city and begins filming, we are aware of unspoken questions that motivate his investigation. Since Miyuki has rejected traditional relationships - and by extension, his love - will she find consolation, or ecstasy, beyond it? Will she find some form of affirming self-actualisation through her identification with new partners, or will she reject love altogether as too narrow, too philistine a construct?

The first time we see Miyuki on camera, she is living with her lover, a young woman named Sugako. Without introductions, Hara takes us directly into a heated quarrel between the two: Miyuki wants to stay together, but Sugako is withdrawn and non-communicative amidst the barrage of questions Miyuki is hurling at her. “So, women need men? Making love means a connection?” says Miyuki. “Living with me isn’t normal?” The volatile exchange evinces Miyuki’s feminist critique of heteronormative relationships and gender binaries, here arising from personal hurt and betrayal. It becomes clear that Hara’s presence, as both a man and Miyuki’s former partner, has contributed to a growing rift between the women.

In the intense early scenes (shot in claustrophobically close, long takes) we sense Hara’s fascination with Miyuki and his own vested interest in the study of her culturally rebellious pursuit of eros. As Miyuki despairs over losing Sugako, the camera trails her in the small, cramped apartment, taking an almost sadistic pleasure in her pain. This could be read as revenge, a replay of the painful rejection that Hara himself suffered when Miyuki left. But the extent to which Hara wants to punish Miyuki remains undetermined. Does Extreme Private Eros level a critique at her for leaving him? Or does the director castigate himself for failing to be an adequate or supportive partner? Even though Hara describes his project in psychoanalytic terms - he is a spurned lover, wielding the camera as a therapeutic tool to remain close to the lost object of his affection - his attempt at closing the wounds of the past does not involve Miyuki, who is uninterested in ‘healing’ her ex-husband. For Miyuki, it is impossible to conceive of her own role as conciliatory, since she increasingly views Hara as yet another stifling male figure in a patriarchal system that continually thwarts her desires. Not unexpectedly, the relationship between the two grows increasingly thorny. Later, when Hara shows up on the shoot with his new assistant (and lover) Sachiko, Miyuki is derisive of what she sees as Sachiko’s accommodation of Hara’s personal and professional needs. In this case, Miyuki condescends to another woman whom she does not consider sufficiently independent.

Ela Bittencourt's complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the release.