Kamikaze Girls (2-disc Special Edition) [DVD] [2005]

One of my favourite films. A very sweet story about an unlikely friendship. You cannot help but love Momo and Ichiko :)

A film not about fashion as the blurb writer tries to highlight, but about creating surrogate worlds to the real one, because the "real one" is too awful to contemplate.

Therefore for an individual who lacks connection - it is better to live in a self composed bubble than face up to a barren empty sterile emotional reality. The film is about a form of social autism that is so common it passes by unnoticed.

Here two young women have shut themselves down, from boys and other women, and inhabited roles and then built defences to close out people. These also operate as barriers, frustrating any sense of personal connection. The first character is a Lolita girl who lives for fashion and the second is a more masculine girl, someone involved in a "masculine protest" who rides a scooter. The latter operates as a milder form of "Hells Angel." As part of her mythology she lives within various personal myths and codes. These are central to the film.

Through the eyes of the two girls we see their mothers and fathers who operate in an emotional oblivion, lacking connection to their children as both sets of parents are locked into their surrogate worlds. With the Lolita girl her mother conducts an affair whilst she is being born. Meanwhile her father is a mind away in making counterfeit goods, wanting money and behaving both with cowardice and conceit. The biker girl comes from a family who wanted her to be the school geek; a role she overthrows with dramatic effect. There is an emotional profoundity to these backgrounds unseen in Western dramatics and the Eastern sense of emotional exploration, even for this film, essentially frivolous, a female buddy movie - it taps a whole strata deeper than anywhere else.

So the film is about both women, one hard and masculine, the other extremely feminine moving out of their autistic shells to make a connection with the world. The film although comic, tender, sad at times becomes brutal - but always essentially philosophic.

What makes the world go around? The answer comes at the end of a telephone when the designer lets his front dissolve and tells his worshiper about his inner emptiness in finding success and lets the secret out of his customised bag; he is friendless. Meanwhile we see two isolated women connecting through their alienation and eventually reaching out across the boundaries, as each shifts into masculine and feminine polarities.

It is a highly emotionally literate film with many sub themes about hero worshiping, the nature of truth, comradeship, outsiderdom and finding a meaning to live a life.

Beautifully made in terms of construction with rich colours, beautiful clothes, ironic scene settings, the poverty of life is offset by the Lolita characters dreams, the hard girl was previously extensively bullied before she toughened up, the joy of the father in seeing his former wife humiliated, the attack on mass production and lifestyles, it is a machine gun garter full of emotional bullets - you just need to be open to catch them.

I just can't stop watching this film over and over - it's become my all-time favourite. It's taken me all of my 60 years to find a film that I can understand so completely - I see parts of myself in each of these two lead characters, despite the fact that they are so beautifully and complimentary opposed... Fabulous script and storyline that actually requires the viewer to have some degree of intelligence to interpret it, and performances that are skilled beyond these girls young years. A bright dayglow beam of sunshine that is streets ahead of the grey porridge that drips out of lacklustre Holywood.... I love it - I want more..!!!! (^_^)