Two girls meet, one obsessed with 18th-century Rococo fashion, the other a confrontational biker with a tricked-out moped. They become best friends. This is the whole film, and it is completely perfect.

KAMIKAZE GIRLS (2004) was directed by Tetsuya Nakashima, who came from a background in music videos and brought that sensibility with him.

The film is constantly kinetic, using animation, fast-cut montages, plot rewinds, and different film formats within the same story, even shifting to Super 8 for key sequences.

Kyoko Fukada plays Momoko with a serene, self-contained detachment - she cannot comprehend why the world isn't organized around Rococo aesthetics.

Anna Tsuchiya, a rock musician in real life, plays Ichigo with an energy that could power a small town.

Nakashima shot it in Shimotsuma, Ibaraki Prefecture - a rural, flat, unremarkable corner of Japan. The gap between Momoko's inner world and her actual surroundings is the joke and also the heart of the film.

Nakashima went on to make Confessions (2010), one of the most devastating Japanese films of the decade.

It occurs to me now that this might make a fun double feature with Times Square (featured in an earlier post).