REVIEW: DVD Release: Kamikaze Girls

Film: Kamikaze Girls
Release date: 8th February 2010
Certificate: 12
Running time: 103 mins
Director: Tetsuya Nakashima
Starring: Kyoko Fukuda, Anna Tsuchiya, Kirin Kiki, Hiroyuki Miyasako
Genre: Comedy
Studio: Third Window
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country: Japan

An ode to individuality, friendship and loyalty in a cynical, somewhat desperate world. Does Kamikaze Girls have anything new to say?

17-year-old Momoko (Fukada) is fiercely individual. Eschewing modern fashion in favour of the rococo style, with which she is forever obsessed, she also treats the people around her with a curiously cold detachment. When her ‘useless’, wannabe gangster father (Miyasako) is run out of the city for selling counterfeit designer merchandise in a scheme that incurs the wrath of both Universal Studios and Versace, Momoko is taken to the countryside to live with her grandmother (Kirin Kiki).

Keen to continue buying her favourite frilly dresses, Momoko begins selling the remainder of her father's counterfeit clothes, and before she knows it, into her life rides Ichigo (Tsuchiya), a sullen, hot-tempered teenage biker girl. Ichigo is also fiercely individual, though her external toughness masks an inner desire to belong and be accepted, even if it’s by just one other person.

These two girls have nothing in common except that they have (different) wild imaginations and slightly skewed views of the world around them. Will their antagonism give way to friendship? And will that friendship survive the challenges life throws at it?


Kamikaze Girls is a film that defies easy categorisation, and this proves to be to its endless benefit, as it shifts gears from zany comedy to odd-couple ‘dramedy’ and, finally, to a tense and gritty urban showdown.

Held together by loveable characters, whose good and bad traits are given equal airing, the story rips through a succession of increasingly bizarre situations and sequences that truly dazzle the heart as well as the eyes and brain. And while the story feels haphazard, it never feels false, even in the final third when the characters inch towards scenarios that are more structured and ‘written’ than what has come before. If a viewer is not entirely sure how seriously to take the face-off that forms the climax, director Tetsuya Nakashima is astute enough to quickly right the course and reassert the film’s offbeat tone before the narrative - alternately madcap and reflective - careens off the rails. It is a measure of the film’s infectious nature that, even during what at first feels like a forced climactic conflict, the audience is always willing to ‘go with it’.

Nakashima’s genius is in making the ordinary memorable, and the absurd relatable - all the while making sure that almost everything is, simply, incredibly funny. The madcap first ten minutes features a rapid succession of bravura images: a love-at-first-sight encounter between a drunk woman, projectile vomiting in a way that would make Linda Blair’s head spin; a petty criminal prostrate and sobbing after losing his nerve on a ‘hit’; the view of Momoko from underneath a cow; the camera angle from the point-of-view of a baby being born; another baby born - wearing a tracksuit! And it continues, with the director employing every nifty trick in the cinematic book - rewinds to the rococo period; to-camera asides; summarising flashbacks and cartoons (“so you kids don’t fall asleep”). A cynic may argue that these are simply cheap tricks, style over substance, and they would miss the point completely - like the central characters, Nakashima goes his own way, according to his own whims and wants. It is the perfect stylistic choice for a narrative about teenage outsiders.

If there is one niggle, it is that the film suffers from a short, second-act lull after its utterly riotous introduction to the life of its protagonist, perhaps waiting a little too long before introducing the second half of its central odd couple, Ichigo. Stalling its pace to fill in her back-story, the film’s opening forty minutes play like two first acts in sequence, before beginning its ‘odd-couple’ story where the two very different girls find, if not common ground, then a definite kinship based on mutual alienation. This is not to take away from the performance of Anna Tsuchiya, who turns one of the more common cinematic clichés - the bad girl who wants to be loved - into an endearing, three-dimensional character that the audience feels and roots for, but her initial appearance effectively ‘catches’ the pinball-like narrative.

What pulls the film through during this slightly sluggish period is its characters - broad, over-the-top, but with a novelistic attention to the little details that lends them richness. Ichigo (…of the Ponytails) is prone to spelling mistakes, mispronunciation and, most memorably, spitting in between threats (“She spat!”). She also makes a habit of head butting Momoko when she is cross. Momoko’s father is gullible, sentimental, and prone to severe depression during bad times and impossible cockiness during the good. Her one-eyed grandmother can pluck insects out of the air with Ninja-like precision.

None of these characters are broader, more over-the-top and richly realised than Kyoko Fukada’s Momoko - a breathtakingly beautiful, endearingly sweet teenager who is nevertheless magnificently selfish and nihilistic, apparently tired of human interaction. The character is almost serene in her perverse, pseudo-angelic superiority (as when her 10-year-old self tells her mother that: “humans are cowards in the face of happiness”). Fukada’s gears shift so smoothly, one never questions Momoko’s contradictions, even when she moves from sternly defending her Rococo-inspired, frilly dress to glibly encouraging the hot-tempered Ichigo make good on a vague threat to kill her. Indeed, before the narrative dictates that she come out of her shell, Momoko’s selfishness should alienate audiences. That it does not is a testament to Fukada’s intuitive performance and natural charisma. If the protagonist wrongly thinks that the world revolves around her, there is no denying that this film gratefully orbits its leading lady.


Infectious, joyous and uplifting. Perfectly tempering cynicism with genuine warmth, Kamikaze Girls is a true delight. JN