Saturday Film Club #10: Kamikaze Girls

Kyôko Fukada and Anna Tsuchiya as Momoko and Ichigo

Director: Tetsuya Nakashima

Country of origin and year of release: Japan, 2004

Adapted from Novala Takemoto's novel, and known in Japan as Shimotsuma Story, Kamikaze Girls has been justly recognised as one of the main cultural channels for the popularisation of Japanese street fashions abroad, particularly the Lolita fashion trend. 

In this fast paced, inventively structured, vivid screwball comedy/female buddy movie, we are introduced to Momoko; a demure, dutiful, Rococco obsessed Lolita, and Ichigo; a loud, aggressive, gobbing motorbike obsessed Yanki. As fully paid up members of their respective fashion tribes, they should, by rights, have nothing to do with each other but - given that they live in the remote, rural rice paddy field dominated town of Shimotsuma in Ibaraki Prefecture - they are thrown together by virtue of being The Only Weirdos In The Village. 

Momoko, we know from the start, had very different beginnings: The result of an inelegant, drunken one night stand between a night club hostess and a hopeless aspiring yakuza in a decidedly more gritty, gangster orientated town, she fell in love with Lolita fashions following a trip to the famous Baby The Stars Shine Bright boutique in the hippest part of Tokyo. Her evolving Lolita look was equally as at odds with the fashion trends in her hometown ("It was tracksuit country") as they are with the credulous locals in Shimotsuma, the quiet town she and her father are forced to flee to following his over ambitious adventures as a fashion counterfeiter. 

She meets Ichigo when, in an attempt to raise funds to feed her fashion habit, she begins quietly selling her fathers counterfeit Versace clothes. The two fail to hit it off and yet Ichigo returns, again and again, and attempts to befriend the aloof Lolita. Momoko, being more interested in Rococco France and embroidery, cannot understand why Ichigo keeps on coming back but it slowly becomes apparent to the audience, if not to Momoko, that Ichigo - despite her posturing - is, at heart, a friendly girl who has seen something in this curiously attired fellow misfit that she likes and admires. 

There follows a series of adventures involving Pachinko, embroidery, an unusually coiffed gangster, an odyssey to Tokyo's ultra hip Daikanyama district, and the entrusting of Ichigo's beloved Kamikaze coat (synonomous with her all girl biker gang tribe, The Ponytails) to Momoko. Somewhere along the way, a friendship is formed, and new loyalties and priorities develop, leading to difficult choices. 

One of the reasons why Kamikaze Girls is such a great watch is its penchant for breaking the fourth wall and messing with narrative structures. When Momoko feels the narrative might be getting a bit slow for the viewer, or there's going to be some backstory coming up, she often turns to camera and signposts the incoming hand break turn. Examples would include the story of her father being told in the form of a short tragi-comic documentary which is shown, to much hilarity, on a TV screen in the station waiting room as she awaits her train. Similarly, Ichigos back story is relayed in a helpful summary, voiced by Momoko, and there is even a short animation detailing the recent history of Ibaraki's girl biker gangs, shown as an intermission feature while Momoko and Ichigo are dining out at the unfeasibly named Forest of the Aristocrats. 

Despite her singularly lone wolf, hard boiled, independent character, Momoko is an oddly likeable character. Even when she's being bad, she's selfish rather than awful, and the final selfless act she commits to at the films climax is - while out of character - a choice that the viewer can fully support.

Similarly, while Tsuchiya's performance as Ichigo often feels over the top, it works because both she and Fukada are playing flamboyantly cartoonish stereotypes that they then, over the course of the film, imbue with humanity, complexity and likability. 

Somewhere in the hectic, technicolour joyride that follows, a very likeable screwball comedy emerges.