I watched this paired with the very stylish and mainstream "Kamakazi Girls (Shimotsuma monogatari)." In addition to the similar names, they come from a similar place.
What happens if you are in the sixties, and you know that women's roles are messed up? Well, you start a powerful enlightened social movement to change it, right? On the sides are the crazies, mostly religious nuts screaming that wimmen is wimmen and God made them soft and subservient.
Now flash forward and see where we are. Perhaps there has been no progress made, we've just shifted from one set of stories to another with the same balance of empowerment and constraint. Perhaps there's just something hardwired into us that prevents us ever from wholesale equivalence of souls. Perhaps Muslim women don't want to be "free," because the alternative is no better and has the additional negative of being unfamiliar.
Here's what we have. In "Kamakazi Girls," the two conflicting roles were explicit in the two characters: a supergirlie girl, in frills and flowers, and a tough girl. Now this tough girl is new in the last couple decades. It a feminized male hoodlum stereotype, coming from the Marlin Brando/James dean mode of cool and tough. Cool here means that you don't care what the world thinks or says, you'll stick it in their eye simply on principle.
It means you want to demonstrate your lack of convention. Since we live in a more cinematic age now, you'll do it with appearance in addition to attitude. In fact, the appearance drives the attitude.
But what about the dual self problem? Girls want to be sexy, but what if they also want to be cool? Okay, here's a path: be a suicide girl. You get to alter your appearance on your skin, which helps in both ways because that way you get to be sexy too. In fact, why not combine the two all the way and do very sexually oriented acts while maintaining your tough cool? You get it both ways, skin being the text for both.
This is as sad as burkhas, and just as deterministically constraining, self-constraining.
Like so many exploitation films, the idea behind it is more interesting than the experience itself. Its odd, because if you go to the website, you can find some characters there who successfully weave a story of intelligence and independence. That may be a fiction, but surely there ARE women out there that are sexy, demonstrable and real. But the women we see here are simple losers. Maybe these are the only ones who would go "on tour."
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
