Lolita in Full Bloom: 1980s Irresistible Heroines

Movies

By GRADY HENDRIX
November 10, 2006

Recently, the annual New York Asian Film Festival looked at its ticket sales from the last six years. More than 150 films had been screened, and the astonishing result was that the movies that sold the most number of tickets all featured Japanese schoolgirls. Based on that fact alone, the Japan Society's "Lolita in Full Bloom: 1980's Irresistible Heroines" should have New Yorkers lined up around the block.

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An image from the film ‘The Little Girl.’ Twenty years ago, the Japanese box office was ruled by a gaggle of emotional adolescent girls, Grady Hendrix writes. But these starlets weren’t being exploited — they were mowing people down.

Those looking for crooked thrills will be disappointed. Firmly focused on the emotions of teenaged girls and with squeaky-clean 1980s pop starlets taking center stage, these flicks are about as dirty as Sani-Wipes and the only kinks on display are emotional.

Judging by the titles alone, it sounds like exploitation heaven: "Sailor Suit and Machine Gun," "The Little Girl Who Conquered Time," "Typhoon Club." But they're surprisingly naturalistic and even the most perverse-sounding oddities like "Exchange Students" (November 18 & 19), about a young boy who wakes up as a high school girl, come at their potentially lurid subject matters via the road less sleazy.

Compared to today's teen movies, which feature creepily mature, overly sexualized teenagers, these films feel as real and raw as wildlife documentaries. But that's not to say there's any hiding what they really are: blockbuster entertainments that earned massive loot at the Japanese box office and shelves full of awards.

The closest to an art film is "Typhoon Club" (November 11 & 18) about a gaggle of high schoolers whose inhibitions evaporate in the face of an oncoming typhoon, transforming them from honor-roll students into naked libertines cavorting in the mud, self-loathing rapists, and suicides. Directed by Shinji Somai, the compositions are downright experimental and scenes unfold in such long, extended shots that you'll find yourself gasping for air.

But the three biggest and best blockbusters give a shout-out to the raincoat brigade, produced as they were by a shady middle-aged man, Haruki Kadokawa. This mega-star producer dominated Japanese cinema in the '80s, matching his bold productions with an over-the-top personality. Writing breathless poetry about Hitler, vacuuming up cocaine, and promising to kill himself if certain films didn't hit their projected grosses, Kadokawa was a supershowman until his arrest and conviction for coke smuggling in 1993. His hit "The Little Girl Who Conquered Time" (November 11 & 19) shows off his skills perfectly.

Starring pop idol-ette Tomoyo Harada as a schoolgirl who travels back in time to warn her friends of an earthquake, the flick is a soft focus swoon of '80s teenage romance, scored to a folksy "new music" soundtrack that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and that Ms. Harada keeps singing at odd intervals. But the big budget touch is classily felt as the film suddenly morphs into a special effects extravaganza in the expressionistic final reel and winds up achieving a genuinely melancholic grandeur.

Kadokawa's pet idol, Hiroko Yakushimaru, represents the alpha and the omega of his career."Sailor Suit and Machine Gun" (November 10 and 12) is a loopy flick wherein Ms. Yakushimaru becomes the head of a yakuza gang, ditching school to carry out raids on rival gangs in her gym gear. The gangsters she inherits from her dead daddy are smitten with her dewy looks and instantly redecorate their headquarters in light pastels before getting stabbed over and over in her defense. Gruesome gore sits side by side with corny comedy culminating in a finale that sees Ms. Yakushimaru, wearing her sailor suit school uniform, invading a rival gang's offices. She orgasmically mows them down with a machine gun then, exhausted and sweaty, she pants, "Ecstasy." Boom! An iconic scene, branded on your brain.

"Sailor Suit and Machine Gun" was such a success at the time of its release that riot police were called out to manage the crowds at the box office, but three years later another Kadokawa/Yakushimaru film, "W's Tragedy" (November 12 & 17), effectively ended the do-no-wrong portion of Kadokawa's career when it bombed. Ms. Yakushimaru plays a young actress who'll do anything to get the lead role in a truly awful stage play. Cast as the lowly maid, burning up with ambitions she can barely articulate, she helps the show's aging diva cover up a death and uses the leverage to steal the starring role in the show. Slow to start, the film hits its stride about halfway through with a number of beautifully choreographed moments, including Ms. Yakushimaru's first stage door appearance, which is as fascinating and terrifying as Norma Desmond's final descent in "Sunset Boulevard."

Wielding its histrionics like a club, it's impossible to know if "W's Tragedy" approves of its heroine's unhinged behavior or hates her for it, but that's par for the course in these movies. They're evil, they're good, they're sugar, they're spice, but as long as they're acting fabulously, the camera stays glued to these electric pop goddesses all the way to the often-bitter ends.

Through November 19 (333 E. 37th St., between First and Second avenues, 212-715-1258).