Kamikaze Girls is a tale of teen alienation and female bonding, painted in vivid candy colours and set to a J-Pop beat. It follows an unlikely, empowering friendship between a ‘Lolita’ Rococco fashion obsessive and an aggressive ‘Yanki’ biker girl, and is a perceptive account of adolescent attempts to forge identity. Smattered with cartoons, dream sequences and surreal set-pieces, and with endearingly conflicted leads, it’s a funny, winning and uplifting slice of Japanese pop culture.
The extravagantly saccharine scenes in Memories of Matsuko serve a different purpose, emphasising the gulf between dreams and reality. Matsuko, a tramp, is found dead in a park and her nephew is asked to clear out her apartment; in the course of this, he pieces together the life-story of this relative he never knew: her neglected childhood, her ill-fated careers as a teacher, massage parlour girl, murderess, prison inmate and Yakuza moll, and her indefatigable search for a man to love her. The episodic structure works well, with each segment of Matsuko’s life allowing her to dream again – in saturated Technicolor, 1950s melodrama or Disney fairytale – before the inevitable disappointment, and it helps that we see her story through the eyes of her nephew, who empathises with his aunt and tries to understand her. Despite all its filmic flights of fancy, Memories of Matsuko never loses sight of its story, the psychological complexities of its central character, or its criticism of the treatment of women in Japanese society.
Both these films are exuberant explorations of the medium of film, postmodern pick ’n’ mix, but Nakashima’s stylistic playfulness enhances rather than detracts from their warmth and narrative.
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