Love & Pop

Love & Pop with English Russian subtitles is a 1998 Japanese experimental film directed by Hideaki Anno, based on the novel Topaz II by Ryū Murakami. It was Anno’s first live action feature-length film. The film was shot almost entirely on hand-held digital cameras and contains some very unusual camera work, including many different mounted camera positions, such as on a model train riding on tracks. The film also flips from widescreen to fullscreen, distorts (with effects such as a fisheye lens), confuses, and makes use of overlays stacked in layers to convey the character’s emotions.

Tokyo schoolgirl Hiromi and her friends engage in a practice known as enjo kosai, or “compensated dating”, where older men pay young girls for dates. Hiromi plunges deeper into this world to raise money for an expensive ring.