Sometimes it is just too tantalizing to simply describe a film as a cross between two unlikely movies, and in a way Miike Takashi's Big Bang Love, Juvenile A evokes Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour (1950) by way of Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003). Well, that explains the earnest, pent-up homosexual prison love amongst the abstract sets hanging in black voids, but what to do about the film’s Mayan-like pyramids and the spaceship? Beginning with an on-camera clapper board and man reading from a book about the miasmic haze obscuring Japan and likening it to the ability to see into the past by traveling light years away or by seeing reflected or refracted light, it is clear that Big Bang Love is Miike in the experimental mood of 2004’s time-traveling samurai film Izo rather than any sort of straight—if extreme—genre take on prison love. And like Izo, this film (correctly and better translated as 4.6 Billion Years of Love) has Miike with his usual deployment of hectic, inspired stylistic convolution, looking at the ever-present existence of social outcasts, and at history repeating itself, feelings and actions recurring forever through all time. But whereas Izo’s bloodbath was about Japanese violence, Big Bang Love with surprising intimacy nurtures displaced and confused homosexual longing as the young criminals are taken to prison, sexual tension is played up as they reflect on their past violence, and the men-boys all end up considering repeating their own crimes under the pressure of giving into their desires and furtively trying to find hope in their imprisonment.

If this were not elaborate enough, Miike’s direction abstracts space as much as the script (based on a manga) abstracts time: for one shot sets will be Dogville-like chalk marks on the ground, in the next a full-fledged but dreamily lit and mystically shaped physical prison cell; the laundry room is merely a pool of yellow water dropped in the corner of a massive void of dark studio space, and the view from the roof is a blue-screen vision of the neighboring pyramid. And the editing refuses to make things easier, as the film starts with at title card reading “Tropics” as a youngster incarnation of current-criminal Kazuki (Ando Masanobu) is cryptically instructed to live life like a man, in a ritual that seems to involve both sexual acts and tattooed moon-lit dancing, before cutting to Kazuki being strangled to death by effeminate fellow inmate Ariyoshi (Matsuda Ryuhei), and the movie only getting more mystifying from there. A scene will start by elliptically detailing Ariyoshi’s hesitant attraction to Kazuki, even though Ariyoshi was sent up for violently killing a man at the first sign of a sexual advance, and then Miike will brazenly shift focus again, turning the narrative into a tongue-in-cheek detective story that tries to ferret out the truth behind Kazuki’s death. The fearless stylistics neither halt nor stop inventing: the detectives’ questions are asked as silent title cards on the screen, a tattoo appears and vanishes at an invisible whim, sunlight pierces melancholy hearts, the warden’s desk sits at a permanently canted angle, and the detective’s interrogation room, steeped in purple neon light, is separated by a viewing window that isn’t a window at all, just a hole in the wall.

Whether there is discernable rhyme or reason to Miike’s prison fable is beyond the point, as the film unexpectedly and poetically seems to make up its own scattershot rationale, as if this bizarre portrait of imprisoned young men was really just like the space shuttle and pyramid outside their windows: a strange and allegorical extension of the mind. In fact, the scenes nominally taking place outside prison in modern day Tokyo have a vague semblance to reality that the more formally deconstructed, mystically linked, and elliptically motivated scenes in the prison strenuously avoid. This contrast is a hint that like in Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain (2006), the primary drama of Big Bang Love along with its off-kilter stylistics are mostly means of an impassioned soul trying to rationalize and find expression for his emotions, ones that seems to be obliquely but vividly repeated again and again for every inmate. To Ariyoshi’s search for irrational love Miike’s film grafts Izo’s consideration of the irrationality of violence, and results in Big Bang Love’s prison-bound romance, focusing on how the entwinement of love and violence seems to incur punishment, ostracization, and cyclic repetition. But the work is not merely an exercise in style; the performances are brooding and sincere despite the opaque characters, and the jumpy, unpredictable development of the film aligns with the two young men’s troubled interiority not just about the morality of their crimes but their future in a world where, in the warden’s words, criminals may spend the rest of their lives committing similar—but never the same—crimes. Inseparable from this is Ariyoshi’s attraction to Kazuki, and the latter’s violent protection of the more passive Ariyoshi, even while scornfully avoiding his attention. The isolation and outcast status of the criminals thus blends with both the hazy homoerotic intentions of many of the prisoners as well as everyone’s propensity to (repeating) violence. In a world where every generation seems to think their teenagers are finding new ways to break with the old, to rebel or otherwise blaze their own trail of individuality, Miike’s unexpectedly beautiful film gradually reveals itself to be a surreal paean to the tortuous existence—mental, physical, social, spiritual and sexual—of confused youths through time immemorial.