Kamikaze Girls

If Kamikaze Girls had been made in the United States, it would have been just another boring film aimed at teenagers, perhaps starring Lindsay Lohan and Hillary Duff as the lonely teens who forge an unlikely friendship; by the end of the film they would have put aside their differences, learned how alike they really are, and formed a band, putting aside their quarrels for the sake of pop music. Fortunately for us, Kamikaze Girls is a Japanese film, not an American one, and instead of another boring teen flick we get to see a this colorful, quirky, fun little film about two lonely teens in rural Japan.

It's true, the plot of Kamikaze Girls isn't compellingly original: an isolated teenage girl lives in a dreamworld until the arrival of another girl who masks her inner loneliness with a veneer of toughness (can you say Ghost World? I knew you could). Fortunately for filmgoers, Kamikaze Girls, imaginatively written and directed by Tetsuya Nakashima,  goes beyond its fairly simplistic plot by blending exaggeration, saturation, and a curious mix of Japanese pop culture and animation to create a film that is both fun and entertaining to watch.

 

Momoko (Kyôto Fukada) lives with her perpetually underachieving father (Hiroyoku Miyasako) at her one-eyed grandmother's house in the Japanese countryside. Her father works for a mobster, selling various conterfeit items at a street stall. Her grandmother (veteran actress Kirin Kiki), who, rumor has it, lost her eye in a fight in her youth, spends her days snatching bugs out of the air and asking Momoko for money for sweets. Momoko is obsessed with rococo - 18th century France - the frilly dresses and parasols, the walks through the countryside, the embroidery, the elegance. Momoko images a decedant rococo world in which everyone spends their time embroidering, going for walks or having sex.

Momoko longs for ruffles and frills, and dresses in an endless array of Lolita outfits that she buys from a Tokyo store called Baby, the Stars Shine Bright (BTSSB). The store is based on a real store in Japan that specializes in Lolita fashion - heavy on frilled pastel baby doll dresses and elaborate bows, bonnets or other such headgear - which has been a popular trend with girls in Japan since about 2001. BTSSB has plans to start marketing its frilly, rococo-influenced designs to the American and European market soon, so don't be surprised to see American malls filled with teenage girls in baby doll dresses, enormous bows, and boots or mary janes with 4-inch platform heels in the near future.

In spite of the oh-so-innocent sweetness of her appearance, however, Momoko has a dark-side. Anti-social and broodingly solipsistic, Momoko lives in a world in which she is the center. She doesn't want or need friends, family, or love; she is an island unto herself. At the age of six, Momoko coldly encourages her mother to marry a new husband and abandon her and her father, then flies off into the sky in her schoolgirl uniform and backpack. At school, she sits at a table by herself, never interacting with her schoolmates, eating her elegant lunch made of only sweet foods.

The only pleasures Momoko seems to get from life are her clothes, and her trips to BTSSB to buy them; despite her anime-ish appearance and obsession with all things rococo, though, she is not (quite) as shallow a character as she seems. There is complexity lurking beneath her frilly surface, even though it might seem the biggest atrocity life has to offer her is the possibility of having to shop for clothes at JUSCO (a Wal-Martesque grocery store that also sells clothing). Momoko goes through life ignoring everyone around her until the day she places an ad for the surplus fake Versace-Universal Studios merchandise her father sold from his street stand and meets Ichigo (newcomer Anna Tsuchiya), a "Yanki" biker chick who belongs to a gang of tough biker girls.

Ichigo (she calls herself "Ichiko" because she thinks it sounds more "Yanki") is a tough chick.  The Yanki are youth gangs that crop up in the Japanese countryside, hanging out in parking lots and acting obnoxious. Ichigo wears a typical Yanki Kamikaze coat covered with embroidered slogans, rides a sussed-up pink scooter, spits frequently, glares ominously, and kicks and headbutts when she doesn't get her way. Like Momoko, however, there is more to Ichigo than meets the eye. The last person you might expect a girl like Ichigo to latch onto would be prissy, elegant, aloof Momoko - it would be practically unheard of for a clanish Yanki to associate with a prissy Lolita -  but latch on she does. Ichigo sees something in Momoko that attracts her, and she is relentless in pursuing the friendship, even when Momoko quite seriously offers Ichigo a head of cabbage as a friend in her place.

When the head of Ichigo's biker gang decides to retire to get married (most Yanki "retire" once they hit the old age of 18 or 19, with the girls frequently becoming young mothers - which is the case with the leader of Ichigo's gang), Ichiho and Momoko embark on a search for a legendary embroiderer to decorate Ichigo's Kamikaze coat for the big going-away parade. It's a status thing among Yanki, you see, to have the most elaborately embroidered Kamikaze coats; the downside, though, is that the more decorated your jacket, the more likely you are to be challenged to a "suicide duel" - vicious fights involving baseball bats and lead pipes that sometimes end in death.

The girls' quest takes them to a pachinko parlor, where they encounter a man known as "the Unicorn" for his amazingly horizontal pompadour, and to BTSSB, where Momoko meets her "god", Lolita designer Akinori Isobe. This is the name of the real head of BTSSB, but in the film he is a character played to comic perfection by Yoshinori Okada, wearing the most amazing Gobelin (elaborate tapestry) suit you could imagine.

The film winds up with a violent Yanki showdown and an unexpected rescue - could the cementing of the friendship between the girls be far behind? Along the way Ichigo realizes, as most of us do once we reach a certain stage of maturity, that the nonconformity she was seeking by becoming a Yanki has tied her into a different sort of conformity altogether, and that Momoko, for all her frills and prissiness, might just be more independent and original than any of them.  Kamikaze Girls is more of an anthropological glimpse at a segment of Japanese youth considered odd by most Japanese than a deep social film. It doesn't particularly explore any deep socio-polical issues – unless, perhaps, you want to stretch the "if Yankis and Lolitas can get along, why can't we have world peace" angle – but film doesn't have to be always grim and serious. A little fun never hurt anyone. Now, where'd I put my copy of Goth and Lolita Bible magazine...?