Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Kamikaze Girls
2004 · Tetsuya Nakashima · Kamikaze Girls on Sightlines
A girl in a Rococo dress stands in a cabbage field.
Pink, tiered, immaculate, absurd. Behind her: Shimotsuma, which amounts to a highway, some sheds, and vegetables. She isn't in costume and she isn't going anywhere special. This is simply what she wears, every day, in a town where nobody has the faintest idea what it means.
Everything Tetsuya Nakashima knows is in that shot, and none of it is a joke at her expense. The dress is armor. Nakashima came to features out of Japanese advertising with the whole kit in his hands: anime cutaways, freeze frames, direct address, color pushed past what the format is supposed to hold. His real invention was to give the kit to his heroine instead of keeping it for himself. The style is what Momoko wears, and the film knows it.
In 1923, before he had made a film, Eisenstein described theatre as a montage of attractions — a show built from shocks aimed straight at the audience, each one picked for its effect rather than its fit in a story. Deleuze takes that idea and finds it a permanent place: he calls the result a Figure, an attraction-image, action transposed into spectacle instead of performed. You get one whenever a film stops doing and starts showing.
Kamikaze Girls is made almost entirely of these. A local grotesque walks on, the frame freezes, a caption lands on him, and the plot sits exactly where it was. Momoko turns and explains herself to us. An anime insert erupts and eats a scene of backstory. By the usual accounting this is a film with no discipline.
So why reach for Deleuze's vocabulary instead of just grading the movie against a shape it never wanted? Because the vocabulary tells you what the film is arguing. Momoko cannot change Shimotsuma. No act available to her would dent it. What she can do is figure it: out-dress it, out-detail it, hold a private eighteenth century up against the cabbages and refuse to blink. The grammar is her strategy. The attraction isn't Nakashima interrupting his story with style. It's the only move his protagonist has.
Now watch the two leads as kinds of image rather than kinds of person. Deleuze splits the close-up in two. There is the reflecting, contour face: immobile, holding a single quality, the face of wonder or contemplation. He calls it a qualisign, an icon of quality. And there is the intensive, feature face, where micro-movements build a series crossing some threshold. Kyoko Fukada plays Momoko as the first, with a deadpan she will not modulate for anybody. Anna Tsuchiya plays Ichigo as the second: spitting, head-butting, features always halfway into the next escalation. The engine of the comedy is two incompatible image-types forced to share a frame. That is a finer description than a clash of temperaments, and it explains why the friendship registers as an event rather than a plot beat.
The color is working too. Deleuze's affective color isn't color as information about a place; it is color that absorbs the scene and its feeling, so mood arrives before content. Momoko's pastel and Ichigo's Yanki hardware don't describe two girls. They are the girls. And frivolity itself gets lifted out of any one personality and presented as a force, which is what Deleuze means by quality-power: a quality offered for itself instead of as the property of somebody's situation. Few films have taken frivolity this seriously. Here it isn't a character trait. It's an intensity the film has decided to study.
Eisenstein's other bequest is the collision that makes a leap. Nakashima collides everything: film stocks, drawn animation, back-projection dropped into the middle of a scene, a collage grammar he inherits from Natural Born Killers. The film's central opposition is the same operation at full scale. Ornament against fists, self-invention against loyalty. What comes out belongs to neither term. The friendship is the new quality, and no single image in the movie contains it.
One more technical point, because it's the best one. The cut from a photographed girl to a drawn girl is not a cut inside a space. It joins across a gap. Deleuze's name for that is the interstice, the cinematic AND, and he found it in Godard's most severe essay films: two images that don't share a world, held together only by the space between them, which you have to fill yourself. There is real pleasure in finding the identical mechanism doing gag work in a candy-colored comedy about Lolita fashion. Same machine, different temperature.
And then the concept that makes the film matter. Deleuze uses fabulation for people caught in the act of legending themselves, inventing a story for a life that no existing story covers. He meant it politically, for peoples with no image of themselves in circulation. Momoko's version is tiny and total. Shimotsuma offers no available picture of the girl she wants to be, so she assembles one out of eighteenth-century French frivolity and wears it out to the fields. She is not escaping into fantasy. She is manufacturing a self from the only materials within reach. The film's sweetest and most serious claim is that this counts as courage.
Its debts are exact. Amélie supplied the voiceover that halts the film to inventory a character's private likes and dislikes, the device Nakashima runs on both girls. Trainspotting supplied the freeze-frame-plus-caption introduction and the wall-to-wall needle drop. Run Lola Run supplied the whip-fast animated aside that compresses a bit player's entire life into a few seconds. Natural Born Killers made the stock-switching collage respectable. At home, Obayashi's House had already carried pop-art optical toys and hyper-girlish surrealism into Japanese features, and Obayashi, like Nakashima, came out of TV commercials. Itami's Tampopo set the register of straight-faced absurdity Momoko performs.
That advertising line is the historical argument. Continuity editing exiled the attraction from narrative film, and it survived in the thirty-second spot, the one form where you must seize an audience with no story to lean on. Two generations of Japanese directors trained there and smuggled it back in. Set that against Bazin, for whom cinema's vocation was the redemption of physical reality, the held shot that lets the world be itself. Nothing in Kamikaze Girls wants to be a record of anything. The feeling still arrives. That's an inconvenience for the purist and a gift to everyone else.
What the film did: before it, the collage kit read as irony or as hustle. Nakashima proved it could carry tenderness, by making every trick diegetic. The flourishes are his heroine's defenses, so each gag doubles as information about a person. It became the cult object that 2000s Japanese pop cinema traveled on abroad, and he later turned the same instrument toward the dark in Memories of Matsuko and Confessions, where the baroque stops protecting anybody.
One question it declines to answer: is the armor a cure or a cage? It keeps Momoko intact and it keeps her alone, and the film won't rule.
So watch for this. Right before Momoko would have to feel something in front of us, the film cuts away: to a drawing, a caption, a burst of pink. That isn't evasion. It's translation, and now you know into what.
Concepts in play
- attraction-image — Freeze-frame-plus-caption introductions for the roster of small-town grotesques, direct address to camera, and anime cutaways that stop the plot to stage a spectacle instead of advancing an act
- the Figure — Momoko cannot change the cabbage-field town, so her whole response is transposed into spectacle: ornamental self-invention, Rococo frills held up against Shimotsuma rather than any action taken on it
- icon of quality — Kyoko Fukada's Momoko, the strange and seemingly emotionless girl, played with deadpan grace — an immobile face holding one unmodulated quality
- reflexive-vs-intensive-face — The film's central pairing: Fukada's contour/deadpan face against Anna Tsuchiya's spitting, head-butting Yanki delinquent, all features and rising intensity
- affective colour — Colors saturated past legality; Momoko's Rococo pastel palette and Ichigo's biker-Yanki register function as the characters rather than as description of a place
- qualité-puissance — Frivolity itself presented for itself as a force — few films have taken frivolity this seriously, and it is studied as an intensity rather than assigned as a trait
- montage-organic/pathetic — The Natural Born Killers collage grammar (switching film stocks, cartoon interludes, back-projection mid-scene) and the head-on collision of two philosophies of girlhood, ornamental self-invention against loyalty-and-fists, producing a third thing neither contains
- interstice / the AND — Cuts from live action to drawn animation and between formats join across a gap rather than within a continuous space, following the Run Lola Run model of animated cutaway biographies
- story-telling / legending — Momoko builds a self out of eighteenth-century French frivolity in a rural cabbage-field town, with the voiceover cataloguing her likes and dislikes as if reciting a legend; the film argues that choosing your own aesthetic is a form of courage