Jun Ariyoshi and Shiro Kazuki arrive in prison on the same day but under unrelated circumstances. Jun worked in a gay bar as a bartender. One of his customers took Jun back to his apartment and raped him. Jun ended up killing the man and then mutilating his body for hours afterwards. Shiro Kazuki came from a nightmarish childhood filled with physical and sexual abuse. He grew up to be a sexual predator and repeatedly went to jail. The most recent time for angrily beating a man to death in an alleyway.

These two inmates, though showing no more expressions of love than Shiro physically lashing out at other inmates who threaten Jun, share an emotional bond that is unspoken.
Shiro is then found dead with Jun hovering over his body and his hands wrapped around Shiro’s throat. Jun immediately confesses to killing Shiro but investigators believe otherwise.

The movie begins with a bizarre prehistoric scene of an old man confiding to a boy to become a man by going down to the beach and meeting a man. That man is then shown ..tattooed and dancing like he is possessed. The movie then cuts to the main setting of the film, a prison, where Jun is shown hovering over the dead Shiro, still strangling his already lifeless body. Jun says repeatedly “I Killed Him” and thus the mystery of what happened begins.

Takeshi Miike then makes remarkable use of non-linear flashbacks to weave an intricate tale of two lost souls that resonates on many different layers. The film is purposefully oblique with many jarring scenes of random images that may frustrate impatient viewers. Examples of some of the more mystifying images would be : Rocket ships, Pyramids, a recurring butterfly, a three-fold rainbow, and tattoo’s that appear on Shiro’s body some of the times. Certain moments are also shown more than once with each recurrence revealing new insight into a scene that may have not been given as much importance otherwise. If you have the type of disposition were you need things presented in ABC order you’re going to be extremely frustrated with “Big Bang Love.”

For me I thought the film was a wild visceral experience that impressed from start to finish. This was all the more surprising because I haven’t had the same type of enthusiasm for Miike’s work in the past. Visually ”Big Bang Love” looked amazing, colors having an over saturated look, while the theater like backdrop was striking. The cast was generally strong, though I found Ryuhei Matsuda to be the weak link in an otherwise strong cast. Ryuhei Matsuda played an effeminate “asexual” character who drew the attention of most of his cellmates with his feminine looks. His performance largely seemed to be a rehash of his character from “Gohatto” and he carried the same brooding mannerisms that we have seen in many of his other films like Collage of Life and Nana. On the other hand, his main counterpart in the film Masanobu Ando impressed with a fiery performance . For people who enjoyed “Battle Royale,” Matsanobu Ando did play the most ruthless of the kids in that movie…the kid that came back to Battle Royale for fun. Also, for fans of Takashi Miike’s “Audition,” they’ll enjoy seeing Ryo Ishibashi make another compelling appearance, this time around as the unhinged prison warden.

What “Big Bang Love” tried to leave for the viewer is a difficult thing to quantify because, like an Etcher painting. people can can interpret those open-ended scenes in various different ways. With that said I viewed “Big Bang Love” as a meditative piece on repressed homosexual tendencies and its origins. From the opening scene with the young boy being told to become a man by going to the beach and meeting the tattooed man, to Jun standing next to Shiro during a strip search and “envisioning” those same tattoos on Shiro, repressed homosexual urges was constant throughout the film. Although Jun and Shiro possessed a deep bond, Shiro ultimately denied any possible sexual relationships with Jun due to his affections for him. To dig further into why Shiro rebuffed any possible sexual relations with Jun a scene in the latter part of the film had Shiro saying “I won’t because you want to go heaven. “