Kamikaze Girls

Vivacious, visually splendid, and crazy.  Kamikaze Girls is part chick flick, part fantasy, with some headbutts along the way. It's a rollicking trip through Japanese subcultures and kitsch, viewed through a brilliantly colorful and imaginative lens.

Momoko is a teenage girl in rural Japan obsessed with the rococco lifestyle and gothic lolita fashion.  She wears frilly dresses and carries a parasol, no matter how out of place she is among the farm community. She is content to be alone and spend her time on clothes.

Ichigo is in a biker gang (well... a scooter gang), spits a lot, likes to fight and headbutt people who disagree with her. She has horrendous fashion sense that seems to be a cross of an 80's rock star and a Walmart shopper. She begins hanging around Momoko and eventually the two become friends.

For all her frilly dresses, Momoko proves the tougher of the two.  She can take or leave people, while Ichigo is tough on the outside but gets her heart broken and cares deeply for her friends. Momoko eventually begins to learn how to care for someone other than herself, and has to decide what's important to her in life.  But don't worry, the movie doesn't get too serious about it.

The movie works on a lot of levels.  It has a great visual style—saturated in brilliant colors, filled with interesting camera work, and it even has some fun animated sections.  It's beautiful and fascinating to watch.

Perhaps more importantly the film has a surprisingly stong emotional core. It's about friendship, teenagers that don't fit in, first love, family, and growing up.  Given how crazy and dreamlike the movie is, it's surprising how true to teenage life it comes across.

Tying the whole thing together are plots involving fashion and gangs.  Fashion is something that I normally find incredibly dull, so it takes something special for a movie to have a significant portion devoted to fashion without boring me.  Somehow Kamikaze Girls pulled it off.  As for the gangs, they play a lesser role but the ending of the movie is pretty awesome.  Baseball bats, headbutts, mud, and blood are involved.

Freneticly shot, charmingly absurd, and gorgeous to look at. Kamikaze Girls is a movie I'd recommend to just about anyone.