It feels absurd to say that Takashi Miike is back because, truthfully, the prolific filmmaker is never gone long enough for us to miss him. He dropped a metric ton of crazy on Cannes recently with his kinetic romance/action flick First Love, and a new trailer is here to herald its place as part of the upcoming TIFF lineup.
Miike’s latest is exactly the brand of insanity we’ve come to expect from the director behind classics such as Ichi the Killer, Sukiyaki Western Django, and Dead or Alive. The story sounds like some wild Tarantino True Romance shit, involving a yakuza war, a drug-addicted call girl, and a terminally ill boxer.
SYNOPSIS: When a duplicitous scheme by the low-level yakuza, Kase (Shota Sometani) goes hilariously wrong, a terminally ill boxer, Leo (Masataka Kubota), and a disturbed drug addicted call girl, Monica (Sakurako Konishi), find themselves innocently caught in the crosshairs of two warring gangs. Over the course of the increasingly ludicrous night, the two fall passionately in love, while the hail of bullets and blood fall quietly in the background. From prolific auteur Takashi Miike, this noir-tinged, violent yakuza film, is Miike at his most fun and anarchic.
Fortunately, we won’t have to wait long to see it for ourselves as First Love hits theaters on September 27th.
