The Stratosphere Girl (2004) Movie
Global community film-making, hey! Directed by a German (Matthias X. Oberg), set in Sweden and Japan, with a French heroine, and speech in English. Angela (Chloe Winkel) is the titular character, the French girl going to school in Sweden who finds young gorgeous DJ Yamamoto (Jon Yang) and falls fast in passion. On Yamamoto’s recommendation, our comic-book-loving, continuously drawing and daydreaming heroine goes on her own for Tokyo to obtain a job hostessing to acquire money and wait for Yamamoto to finish his journey back to his native city.
Angela attempts to create a home in Tokyo, ever the vertiginous, cacophonous, midnight wonderland, inexplicably foreign yet warm both. She lives with a gathering of other Euro-wastrels in an overcrowded apartment where leaning too hard on a wall can send you toppling through into the next unit. Angela, at first hard-up, ultimately snares a job at a karaoke nightclub, where the exceedingly caustic other hostesses like to haze each-other with crap in the shampoo and glass in your teriyaki.
But Japanese males admire her sassy manner and Francais-chic beauty. Angela starts to earn a modest amount, but not as much as another girl who gives what the Japanese term “the view into eternity” (spreading her legs) (spreading her legs). Angela quickly finds herself captivated by the disappearance of a fellow hostess, Larissa, a Russian girl, who could have been killed when hosting a private party hosted by the unscrupulous emigre tycoon Kruilman (Filip Peeters, who implies a Dwight Frye for the iPod age).\s.
Stratosphere Girl is an intriguing, if ultimately perplexing, clash of genres; splashes of nouvelle vague, Hitchcock dream-thriller, experimentalist visual collage. Like Lost In Translation, Tokyo is the principal topic of the film, the hyperkenetic muse.
If that film had decided to be a Hitchcock thriller, this is what it would look like; the contrast between the hard-working girls trying to make a quid and the undercurrent of hidden menace reminded me of Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg; but it is finally not as serious as it appears, and builds to an amusing but rather cheating climax.
The surface swirls in lovely translucent hues and a so-chic style that continually intercuts between the film and Angela’s drawings of those people, situations, and objects she meets, which dovetails eventually with the film’s extremely fun sense of reality. It is far from a fantastic picture – largely because of the stiff performance, notably from the stunning but wooden Ms Winkel, and lastly the somewhat pompous excess of perception-bending.
