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Bye Bye Love (Baibai rabu バイバイ・ラブ) (18*)

Queer 70s

,Cinema 3
A person's head wrapped in tape measures, bathed in green light

A wild and violent road trip with a genderqueer partnership at its centre, Isao Fujisawa’s breathtaking and radical movie was thought lost until a negative was unearthed in 2018.

An exhilarating rush from start to finish, Bye Bye Love begins with a frenzied anti-‘meet cute’. A young woman, referred to as ‘Giko’ (Miyabi Ichijo) flees the cops and barges into a rebellious macho guy, ‘Utamaro’ (Ren Tamura) whom she implores for help. Soon, a policeman is dead, and the pair spend the rest of their relationship on the run. Giko is revealed to be gender fluid and the two forge a queer partnership in crime.

While the depiction of Giko’s identity is inevitably of its time, the character, unforgettably played by Ichijo, is sympathetic and has a lot of agency in the film. Bye Bye Love captures the nihilistic zeitgeist, (a character called Nixon is gunned down soon after entering the story), looking back on the broken promises of the 1960s. It’s a thrilling, provocative film, infused with the energy of early Godard.

Tagged with: Cinema Queer 70s

In Japanese with English subtitles

Please note this film contains outdated representation of a queer character

Film information

Release year: 1974

Country: Japan

Director: Isao Fujisawa

Runtime: 1hr 25 min

Ticket prices

£10.40

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‘Playful, anarchic, and unusually prescient, Bye Bye Love feels like a transmission from a gender-queer future that had yet to be defined‘
Luke Goodsell, Metrograph Journal

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