Film

Kamikaze Girls (Shimotsuma Monogatari)

Description: Feelgood coming of age story centring on candy-coloured Momoko, a perpetually cheery devotee of the pink frilly baby doll look popularised by Japanese girls. A slave to knee socks, Momoko attempts to fund her fashion habit by placing an advert to sell off some of her father's belongings. Feisty goth Ichiko responds and the two misfits from opposite ends of the sartorial and social spectrums become unlikely friends and confidantes.

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Dir: Tetsuya Nakashima.

Cast: Kyoko Fukada, Anna Tsuchiya

Country: Jap.

Year: 2004.

Duration: 103mins

Kamikaze Girls is full of oddball eastern promise

Teenage kicks: fashion-obsessed Momoko (Koyoko Fukada) and her best friend Ichigo (Anna Tsuchiya)

By Derek Malcolm
5 Jun 2008

If this lively and quirky film about the friendship between two teenage girls were not in Japanese, with subtitles, it might well be a box-office hit with more than teens in the UK. One girl (Kyoko Fukada) is a Day-Glo clothes-mad dreamer from a boring country town who fantasises about living in 18th-century Versailles; the other (Anna Tsuchiya) is a Goth biker chick who likes bit of rough and tumble.

Tetsuya Nakashima�s film won many awards back home and was watched by millions. It is acted with real panache and directed with a wonderful sense of absurdity.

This is a Japan you won�t have seen before, apeing the consumeroriented West while maintaining a special cultural flavour of its own. An unexpected pleasure.