Some Japanese films featuring out-of-control youth have taken a ‘concerned adult’ perspective, presenting the rise of youth crime and subcultures as a problem rooted in social change. The award-winning ‘Kamikaze Girls’, takes an insider view of it’s like to be young in Japan’s highly developed consumer society.

Unfortunately, the colourfully surreal melange of Japanese youth subcultures tends be hard on the viewer. That’s putting aside trying to understand the plot. The relationship between Momoko, (Kyoko Fukada in top pouting form) , and Ichigo, ( a scowling Anna Tsuchiya) teenagers with contrasting outlooks and affiliations, is depicted in quick-fire editing, saturated colours, and over-decorated sets which dazzle the eye and stupefy the brain. Attractive as the surreal images are, they provoke a recurring desire to slow down the film to take in some of the detail.

Momoko, the ringletted Lolita-like heroine lives a hermetic existence in her frilly dresses and Rococo-inspired boudoir in the small village of Shimotsuma. She apparently lives on desserts and makes Barbie seem almost macho. Obsessed with dresses and accessories, she occasionally makes the train journey to Tokyo to buy clothes from an exclusive store called ‘Baby, the Stars Shine Bright’ instead of the more prosaic local Wal-mart-style chain. Financially challenged, she decides to sell some of the big-label clothes her addled father has left over from the days of his gangster youth. When tough-talking gum-chewing biker chick ‘Yanki’ Ichigo turns up they circle each other, exchanging takes on life – ‘Ugh! Do you have to spit!’ says Momoko whilst Ichigo tells her to toughen up – until they finally bond.

The director says he told the two lead players to ‘do over the top’, and they’ve carried out his instructions to the letter. Momoko, mincing along in her pink and blue frillies like Little Bo-peep without her crook and the stripy-haired Ichigo, snarling and swaggering in her embroidered cloak-like silk coat, make an eye-catching duo. Momoko says she rejects the small-town narrowness which surrounds her but she replaces it with another kind of identification, the more sophisticated commercialism of Tokyo’s lead fashion designers, all too familiarly exploitive.

Ichigo models herself on legendary Himiko, toughest Yanki of all. ‘I decided to deliver it in a style of gag cartoon’ says the director and augments the onscreen adventures of the unlikely heroines by anime inserts which allow us to see how Momoko regards Ichigo’s motivation – as derived from comic-books models, although Momoko’s reliance on fairy-tale imagery of the eternally cute child is just as unrealistic.

Compared in its pace and subject matter to Tarantino’s work in ‘Kill Bill’(2003) , with some Monty-Python-like effects and an ‘Amelie’(2001)-like presentation, viewing can take its toll, accompanied by a soundtrack with mixes heavy metal tracks and overblown western retro-pop. These are the main accompaniment to scenes where the bizarre pair hit the road in search of the best clothes designer in town so that Ichigo’s cloak can be embroidered to suit an upcoming anniversary. The final encounter between Ichigo and her rival gang-members allows Momoko to demonstrate her loyalty to her new-found ally. It's a rare example of action overshadowing image in this clash-and-merge account of two kinds of rebellion within a larger restrictive society.

'Kamokaze Girls' is part of touring programme, 'A Life More Ordinary:A Portrait of Contemporary Japanese People on Film', in UK cinemas Feb-March 2007

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Sorry, 2008.