`Stratosphere Girl': An interesting, but half-hearted experiment

Paul F. Agusta, Contributor/Jakarta, Pfa0109@yahoo.com

A film that will likely highlight the generation divide, Stratosphere Girl blurs the lines between traditional cinema and the Japanese cultural phenomenon known as manga.

This niche film may be adored by teenagers but judging from the audience's reaction, it seems to be being taken with a grain of salt by anyone over 25.

This is not to say that Stratosphere Girl does not have some fascinating elements. The idea of mixing hand-drawn cartoons from the pages of a graphic novel with well-composed camera shots is in itself novel as experimentation, and is sometimes visually stunning.

The atmospheric techno music on the soundtrack is also inspired, and some of the actors' performances are solid if not commendable.

The film starts out excruciatingly slowly when a young girl named Angela, played by the annoyingly wooden but very blonde Chloe Winkle, falls for the smooth talk of an other-worldly handsome DJ, played by seductive Jon Yang, on their first evening together.

Taking his advice, she flies off to Japan looking for adventure and expecting him to follow close behind.

Once in Tokyo, Angela finds lodging with three other young expatriate women, who work as hostesses at a club for wealthy Japanese businessmen, and ends up working there herself.

It is here that she stumbles upon a mystery -- a Russian hostess named Larissa has inexplicably disappeared.

Angela, an extremely gifted, imaginative and creative soul, digs and delves and speculates on paper through her manga-style drawings about what she suspects took place prior to Larissa's going missing.

The story that Angela spins out of her over-active mind is not a pretty tale, but one that piques the audience's interest enough to spur speculation once the snail's pace of the first act begins to accelerate into a more interesting second.

Tension rises as Kruilman, a cross between Humbert Humbert (remember Lolita?) and The Big Bad Wolf, played by the comically demonic Filip Peeters, appears at the club throwing lots of money at the girls and taking an unhealthy interest in Angela.

The instant Angela finds out Kruilman was one of the last people to be seen with Larissa before she vanished, she feigns interest in the loathsome man and agrees to be taken to a party at his house.

At the party, she encounters still another nefarious figure named Oshima, a powerful businessman with a fetish for young blondes, played convincingly shadowy by Togo Igawa.

At this point in the film one starts to wonder what Lost in Translation might have been like had Sophia's father been David Lynch instead of Francis Ford Coppola.

Darker and darker, and stranger and stranger, the screenplay makes promises it cannot possibly deliver without an ending reminiscent of a James Elroy novel.

Then, the twisting, turning, stretching -- and yawning -- begins, and the plot somehow takes a detour into Disneyland with what probably will go down in history as one of the most forced endings in modern cinema.

Writer and director M.X Oberg conducts what is an interesting experiment with a mix of cultural styles, media and storytelling, but his film seems to have trouble deciding what it wants to be.

It has the alluringly unpredictable logic of Japanese graphic novels and is just as visually tantalizing and entertaining. It is also extremely pedestrian in its adherence to the traditional three-act paradigm of cinematic storytelling, and herein exists the dilemma.

How far should a filmmaker be willing to go in exploring new stylistic possibilities? And where, exactly, should the director draw the line between exploration and convention?