Dasepo Naughty Girls
Since this film is all about style (okay, not only but its style is remarkable), I would like to point out that I started a Pinterest board for furniture I like.1 Some of them are either impossible to get (like those floor chairs) or way too expensive in the first place (like famous designer stuff). It’s more like an inspiration board for what our future interior should look like. Right now we are planning a modern-style living room and a vintage-style bedroom. (And no, we won’t really have a nursery.) So feel free to recommend things to us!
Speaking of style, having grown in dress size these days, I have begun to enjoy less form-fitting clothing styles. To be honest, there aren’t very many options for pear-shaped women out there (as opposed to the hourglass-shaped Christina Hendricks type), but today I stumbled yet again upon Cotton Friend2 and its simple, flowing Japanese clothes. I think they are a good compromise – easy to sew, comfortable and stylish in its own way. Maybe another trip to Muji is in order. Incidentally, I am wearing a dress from Muji right now!
“Dasepo Naughty Girls” is almost the exact opposite of that mid-30s-Japanese-housewife-minimalist style. The film is very youthful and unexpectedly artistic. I think that all the silly visuals in the movie are very well thought-out. The silly cosplay-ish style is absolutely deliberate. Instead of making the students look cheap as most cosplay costumes do, the clothing design is amusing and artistic, highlighting its characteristic of a high school parody. To be more precise, a cosplay costume has a tendency to be overly sexual, whereas all costumes in “Dasepo Naughty Girls” are surprisingly tame. Just google the film and you’ll see that the screenshots almost all feature long dresses and practically an inexistent dekolleté. Curiously, the promotional photos often feature more skimpy outfits and (by Jove!) even some tops revealing both the chest and the belly button.
Who knows, maybe I just love the uniforms in the film because I am a sucker for orange. However, there aren’t many orange uniforms in real life, making this choice of color both cute and refreshing in my eyes.
Most importantly – I have hinted at it already – the film is a lovely satire of the whole high school genre. If you have ever seen Asian high school romances before, no matter whether in anime or live drama form, and especially if you’ve grown tired of it, you will enjoy how “Dasepo Naughty Girls” plays on all these clichés. Just recently I have complained about how “Brüno” had no red thread and felt like a collage of pointless tidbits of story while “The Dictator” was coherent, but in “Dasepo Naughty Girls” I didn’t mind the anecdotal nature of the film at all. So I should probably take back what I said. While I enjoy a consistent story with an overall goal and some sort of showdown at the end, for a comedy it is perfectly alright if there is nothing tying those little episodes together. As long as each episode is enjoyable by itself, they don’t have to lead up anywhere (unless you count the graduation at the end, which can only be described as an “everybody gets together at the end to have a big party” scene).
One of the advantages of aforementioned little episodes is my impression that everything in this film is very optimistic and playful. While it portrays a rather depraved society in which everybody is sex-crazed and perverse, it’s actually taking it all with a grain of salt. All characters are ultimately lovable, especially that cross-dressing CEO. He’s the perfect example of a perverse-looking guy who actually just wants some harmless fun in life. In the end, he was a friend to the protagonist and being the most bland and boring character in the entire film, I think she could use a friend like that.
“Dasepo Naughty Girls” is the kind of film that I would want to revisit over and over again. In fact, I did that for this blog posting. Oh and it has musical elements too!
Now for the infamous hail of bullets:
- Even though I perfectly enjoyed the little episodes, the most memorable scene will still be the protagonist girl’s high-school-outfit shirt. I love how the bow of the school uniform is printed on the shirt.
- In my book, the film even got its hairstyles right. Everybody is totally overstyled (except for the protagonist of course), but a part of me secretly wants to wear my hair like that.
- Speaking of furniture, the rich Swiss transfer student (yes, every high school drama or its parody needs a transfer student) lives in an awesome place. I want to live in an apartment that looks like a Mac computer.
- I also have a little crush on that Swiss boy, hahaha.
This time we also have some footnotes:
- I don’t actually like Pinterest, but for these purposes it’s brilliant.
- If you know any other resources for this type of clothing, be all means let me know.