Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.5

First Love Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 6, 2020

There’s an old, almost meme like, joke that goes something like, “Have you ever seen [Person A] and [Person B] together?”, in what is a reference to how similar two people can be, with a suggestion that maybe, just maybe, they’re the same individual if indeed you haven't ever seen them side by side. While I’m not certain if they actually share any screen time together without going back and checking, Takashi Miike and Quentin Tarantino might have been able to evade that query due to their collaboration in Eli Roth’s 2005 horror opus Hostel. Tarantino also appeared in Miike’s gonzo Sukiyaki Western Django, and both film titans evidently received “acknowledgements” in the credits listing for Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman (note that the link points to a UK Blu-ray release). That said, while it's perhaps debatable as to whether or not anyone has ever seen them together, there are undeniable links between Miike and Tarantino, and for a potent example of at least some of those links, one need look no further than First Love, another crazy quilt offering from Miike that is both deliriously funny and often quite spectacularly graphically violent, often at the same time.

While there’s no put upon word processor at the center of this story, in a kind of bizarro world way, First Love is weirdly reminiscent of After Hours (interestingly, After Hours' helmsman Martin Scorsese also receives an “acknowledgement” credit in Bring Me the Head of the Machine Gun Woman), if only in terms of both films offering a story featuring a hapless guy involved in an insane series of “overnight adventures” in an almost carnival like urban environment. At least the hapless guy in this instance, Leo (Masataka Kubota), is a promising boxer and so has a few skills other than typing vis a vis his hands. Leo’s boxing career hits a snag when he’s ko’d by a “whiff” punch, but it turns out he may have some medical issues that need attending to. On a nighttime roam, he ultimately meets more or less cute (“Miike cute”, it should be stated) with drug addled “working girl” Monica (Sakurako Konishi).

By the time Leo and Monica do meet cute (Miike or otherwise), a number of other characters and interwoven subplots have already been introduced. Those include a midlevel yakuza named Gondo (Seiyô Uchino), who has just gotten out of stir; Kase (Shôta Sometani), a would be Yakuza with dreams of taking over courtesy of sidetracking an imminent shipment of meth; and Otomo (Nao Ohmori), a cop potentially on the take with links to both Kase and Monica. Playing most hilariously into the absolutely insane plot, however, is Julie (Becky), a take no prisoners sort who for a brief time is the girlfriend of Yasu (Takahiro Miura), Monica's pimp and just one of a rather staggering number of ultimate victims who add to an almost Hamlet-esque body count. Suffice it to say that there is a shipment of drugs, one that starts getting passed around like all those confusedly errant suitcases in What's Up, Doc?, to suitably screwball comic effect, though that said, the Peter Bogdanovich film had virtually no decapitations or other bodily severings, two things that are recurrent elements in First Love.

Two kind of running gags permeate much of First Love. First, Kase is really trying to become a "real Yakuza", but spends most of the film inadvertently killing people (which kind of makes him an unintended Yakuza, I guess). Second, Julie becomes increasingly unhinged as things spiral out of control, but she has an almost genetic ability to avoid harm, resulting in several rather funny close calls, which only send her further over the edge (her attempts to recruit helpers to "just kill people" are a comedic highlight of the film).

I’ve taken some heat through the years for supposedly “not understanding” Miike, and I’d be the first to admit that films like Ichi the Killer don’t really appeal to me in the same way that, say, Zebraman 2: Attack on Zebra City, do (though you’ll note I gave both films the same overall score). For whatever reason, Miike’s outré comedic sensibilities resonate the most fully with me personally, and in that regard First Love provided me with several hearty guffaws, even if some of them were also kind of mixed with “ewww” gross out reactions. The film pretty much starts “at 11” and then accelerates from there, with a climax that goes on forever inside a store where all sorts of carnage ensues, again often combining laugh out loud physical humor with a copious amount of blood and gore. In other words, it’s a Miike film.

First Love Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

First Love is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. Kind of frustratingly given its recent provenance, I haven't been able to dredge up any technical information on the shoot, other than that cinematographer Nobuyasu Kita evidently has a preference for Arri cameras, for what that's worth. This is another Miike effort that is long on style, including tons of weird lighting and grading, and as such detail levels can kind of fluctuate depending on those elements. A lot of the yellow or yellow-green drenched material can look just slightly blanched, with arguably slightly less fine detail at times, while some of the darker choices, notably a lot of the blue or blue-green material, actually provides some surprisingly consistent levels of fine detail. Some outright stylistic flourishes are included, as indicated by screenshots 3, 10 and 15.

First Love Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

First Love features DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks in either the original Japanese or English dub. In doing a little toggling, I didn't notice any major difference in mixes or amplitude levels between the two, other than the obvious difference in language being spoken. I'm an original language purist, and so stuck with the Japanese track for most of the film, and it's a rather boisterous, often hyperbolically active, affair, with a ton of low end throughout and a whirlwind of fun immersive effects in some of the showdowns especially. A lot of the film takes place outside in a crowded city environment, and there's what I'd almost call "an urban wind" rushing through as general background clatter a lot of the time. Dialogue, score and effects are all presented without any problems whatsoever on this enjoyable track.

First Love Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Teaser Trailer (1080p; 1:10)


• Trailer (1080p; 1:52)

Note: As tends to be the case with Well Go USA Blu-ray releases, the supplements have been authored to follow one another automatically (so that clicking on the Teaser Trailer is essentially a Play All button). After the Trailer for this film plays, the disc has been authored to automatically move on to trailers for other Well Go USA releases. Those trailers for other Well Go USA releases also play automatically at disc boot up.

First Love Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The fact that it's taken until the closing words of this review to get around to mentioning the fact that Monica is chased for much of the film by a grimacing ghost of sorts who dons a sheet and is otherwise clad only in a kind of Sumo wrestler diaper (see screenshots 12 and 18) may indicate as well as anything just how off the wall First Love often is. My personal advice is that if you're acquainted with Miike and tend to like his more outlandishly funny films like The Happiness of the Katakuris, you're probably going to love First Love. Others may want to consider the fact that this supposed "love story" is stuffed to the gills with a lot of violence and killing, though much of it is played for laughs. Technical merits are solid, and First Love comes Recommended.