Kamikaze Girls has worn us down by its end, a film mostly devoid of any kind of stone-wall nor indeed nourishing substance, although scoring rather highly on the style content. We come away from it recalling the funky camera techniques; the colour scheme; the sporadic costumes and other things which are generally left to filmmakers whom we feel are in total control of their project and are doing what they're doing for very specific reasons, like the breaking of the fourth wall. In short, things in Kamikaze Girls do not hold together; a film I read has some sort of ground in Japanese Manga comics, of which I am unfamiliar, in spite of the fact the piece as a whole just felt very dialogue heavy to be more broadly linked to any kind of comic book. The film is, I think, a comedy; although there are very few laughs whereas the room it makes for itself to develop a heterosexual love affair between two people, place a homo-erotic tie under the microscope or indeed use a father-daughter relationship as the basis for predominant material are each sideswiped for the sorts of off kilter content one often finds infuriating when these sorts of projects just don't quite come off.
The film opens with a motorcycle accident. We've seen motorcycle accidents in films before, but not one which opens after a mock-comic book picture board of varying drawn frames as a lead character then narrates to us in slow-motion how she collided with a van carrying pineapples before hoping she'll be reincarnated in 18th Century France should she die. The as described manner about which the film goes depicting said opening ought to speak volumes. From here, a flashback to several months ago begins a host of superfluous tidbits attempting to establish where the lead is coming from. That lead is Momoko (Fukada), a young girl; a character, we feel, we would not otherwise had seen on the screen had 2001's Amelié not been the hit it was. She speaks of how she really wants to shop in Japan's capital, Tokyo, but can't and laments being stuck in the town that she is due to the tacky supermarkets which offer consumerist products and don't give provide her what she wants. Ho hum. Her parents are divorced, but this doesn't bother her; her father a sort of cash-cow to whom she goes to fund her image which she constructs around the desiring to look like a baby's doll of some kind.
It is her father's being caught selling clothes under the banner of fake labels which ends things here and sees Momoko pushed further afield to her grandmother's living of a quieter life away from shops and general bustle. Momoko sticks to the tried and tested enough to keep in the flow of things, and a biker gang inception as well as the bonding with a games arcade dwelling boy named Ryuji (Abe) sparks a love interest. Aside from anything else, the film is a depiction of a bond between lead Momoko and that of Ichigo (Tsuchiya), a would-be rough biker chick whose childhood was ridden with faults and who ended up in the clan of leather wearing, bike driving girls that she is. Momoko and Ichigo's tryst carries with it particular homo-erotic undertones, Momoko's on-off romance with Pachinko gambling Ryuji a sub-story there to mask what is ultimately a tale of two girls of such stark backgrounds coming together and realising that what they have to offer one another is more important that any sociological expectancy.
Principally, these two girls of such binary oppositions aid one another in ways neither of them envisage. Ichigo is a disillusioned young girl in need of someone frank and lateral in order to cheer her up. Similalry, Momoko has before glanced over her parents' divorce and needs an experience to have her realise how much it ought to have affected her; this exposure to a grittier way of living away from the frilly and carefree nature of her old existence with someone who has been through similar childhood hardships the required tonic. It is a shame such a dynamic is often buried under the poorly choreographed aesthetic director Tetsuya Nakashima applies to the material, that of bouncy and frilly and just generally juvenile when adult subject matter is trying its hardest to burst out from underneath. Momoko quickly becomes tiresome as a lead, her episodic life as she darts from sewing for a living to casino loitering to becoming caught up in an impending biker gang war delivered to us in a fashion that has it too much to absorb without enough bare-boned substance to keep us interested. I read it began life as a book and has since had ties to the comic book world – I've no intension of catching up on either medium depicting what I saw here but I imagine all this colour and empty spectacle looks a lot better on the pulpy pages of a Manga novel or on the pieces of paper imbued within that of a book as words and sentences play out allowing its reader to use their imagination to bring to life what's being described. Nakashima brings those words to life here in this film, but they are visual incarnations few should find particularly interesting.
The film opens with a motorcycle accident. We've seen motorcycle accidents in films before, but not one which opens after a mock-comic book picture board of varying drawn frames as a lead character then narrates to us in slow-motion how she collided with a van carrying pineapples before hoping she'll be reincarnated in 18th Century France should she die. The as described manner about which the film goes depicting said opening ought to speak volumes. From here, a flashback to several months ago begins a host of superfluous tidbits attempting to establish where the lead is coming from. That lead is Momoko (Fukada), a young girl; a character, we feel, we would not otherwise had seen on the screen had 2001's Amelié not been the hit it was. She speaks of how she really wants to shop in Japan's capital, Tokyo, but can't and laments being stuck in the town that she is due to the tacky supermarkets which offer consumerist products and don't give provide her what she wants. Ho hum. Her parents are divorced, but this doesn't bother her; her father a sort of cash-cow to whom she goes to fund her image which she constructs around the desiring to look like a baby's doll of some kind.
It is her father's being caught selling clothes under the banner of fake labels which ends things here and sees Momoko pushed further afield to her grandmother's living of a quieter life away from shops and general bustle. Momoko sticks to the tried and tested enough to keep in the flow of things, and a biker gang inception as well as the bonding with a games arcade dwelling boy named Ryuji (Abe) sparks a love interest. Aside from anything else, the film is a depiction of a bond between lead Momoko and that of Ichigo (Tsuchiya), a would-be rough biker chick whose childhood was ridden with faults and who ended up in the clan of leather wearing, bike driving girls that she is. Momoko and Ichigo's tryst carries with it particular homo-erotic undertones, Momoko's on-off romance with Pachinko gambling Ryuji a sub-story there to mask what is ultimately a tale of two girls of such stark backgrounds coming together and realising that what they have to offer one another is more important that any sociological expectancy.
Principally, these two girls of such binary oppositions aid one another in ways neither of them envisage. Ichigo is a disillusioned young girl in need of someone frank and lateral in order to cheer her up. Similalry, Momoko has before glanced over her parents' divorce and needs an experience to have her realise how much it ought to have affected her; this exposure to a grittier way of living away from the frilly and carefree nature of her old existence with someone who has been through similar childhood hardships the required tonic. It is a shame such a dynamic is often buried under the poorly choreographed aesthetic director Tetsuya Nakashima applies to the material, that of bouncy and frilly and just generally juvenile when adult subject matter is trying its hardest to burst out from underneath. Momoko quickly becomes tiresome as a lead, her episodic life as she darts from sewing for a living to casino loitering to becoming caught up in an impending biker gang war delivered to us in a fashion that has it too much to absorb without enough bare-boned substance to keep us interested. I read it began life as a book and has since had ties to the comic book world – I've no intension of catching up on either medium depicting what I saw here but I imagine all this colour and empty spectacle looks a lot better on the pulpy pages of a Manga novel or on the pieces of paper imbued within that of a book as words and sentences play out allowing its reader to use their imagination to bring to life what's being described. Nakashima brings those words to life here in this film, but they are visual incarnations few should find particularly interesting.