AFI Dallas Report: Linda Linda Linda Review

Regular Forum contributor Joshua Hurtado was kind enough to write up his thoughts on a film that ScreenAnarchy's Mack raved about way back in September 2005. Let's rev up the buzz!

My first film of this inaugural AFI Dallas International Film Festival was Linda Linda Linda on Friday night.

It seemed like every auditorium at the venue where this film showed, The Landmark Magnolia, was delayed, and L3 was no exception. The screening was scheduled for 7:30 and we didn't begin seating until around 8. Shortly after the crowd was finished seating we all got a surprise in that Chiho Mori, chair of the Asian Film Festival of Dallas and co-sponsor of this screening, announced to the room that director Nobuhiro Yamashita was in attendance and would be fielding questions afterwards. Cool.

I do tend to ramble about the surroundings and atmosphere, and I was going to try to keep that to a minimum this time, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the SNAFU's at the beginning of this screening. When the film came up, the screen was set to Academy standard 1.33:1, which led to a significant portion being projected onto the sides of the auditorium, the projection was noticeably out of focus, and there was a horrid buzzing in the audio track. It was so bad that the director left his screening to go complain to the management.

After about 10 minutes of futzing around, the film was being projected properly, and about five minutes after that, I couldn't care less as I was drawn into the story completely.

Linda Linda Linda is the story of four high school girls and their band preparing for a performance at a school festival. Early in the film it is revealed that one of the girls has gotten into a fight with a member of the band and they've decided to split. Just as the coordinator is ready to pull their performance slot, they decide to go for it, but now they are short a guitarist and vocalist. After a little debate, the old keyboardist Kei (Yu Kashii) declares that she'll play guitar.

Finding a new vocalist is not so easy, as no one in the band has any interest in singing. Eventually, the girls are sitting on a brick wall and decide that whomever they see walk by next will be the new singer. A couple of false starts later, Korean exchange student Son (BAE Doo-na) walks by and accidently accepts their invitation. The rest of the film is pretty firmly focused on the four girls learning the music and demonstrating the amount of hard work they have to put in, to the exclusion of the rest of the world. The music they end up choosing from a box of old tapes and records, and one of them decides they should play The Blue Hearts songs "Linda Linda," "The Endless Song," and "My Right Hand."

This music is the impetus that makes an otherwise pretty deliberately paced film move forward at a decent clip; the music is upbeat and exciting. We, the audience, get to watch as everyone in the film learns, which is a very interesting thing to watch. We watch the band learn the songs, we watch Son learn Japanese, we watch Kyoko (Aki Maeda), the drummer learn to come out of her shell, and at least the first two item of that list were happening for real. Only one of the girls is a musician, the rest had to learn to play for their parts, and BAE Doo-na spoke very little Japanese going into the production, but by the end everyone in the band is working as a convincing and rocking unit.

I rarely get chills in films anymore, but after watching the girls' band practicing night and day and struggling to get it right, the first time they nail a song in the practice space, I got chills. It was an exhilirating moment, not to mention the climax of the film, the actual performance. We struggle with these characters all through the film, building to this one very definite moment, and when it arrives, we are not disappointed.

The final tune the band plays, "The Endless Song," is a perfect ending to the film and very effectively sums up the band's attitude and their desire to "sing an endless song for this asshole of a world." The film's direction was superb, by focusing so directly on the band and their struggle, we feel vindicated at the end when they succeed, and there are no loose ends to tie up, no sub-plots left open, just a good, old-fashioned happy ending. BAE Doo-na is the star of this film and she proves it with every second she's onscreen, creating a very likable character who, despite, or perhaps because of, her language barrier is able to tell things they way they are.

I was very impressed, and I'll definitely be picking up the DVD, which is scheduled for US release 5/8/2007, probably also a couple of Blue Hearts CDs. The girls also released a single in Japan under the name of their band in the film. The video is available on Youtube, if you want to see a little bit of them performing.

Report and Review by Joshua Hurtado

LINK
Linda Linda Linda Coming to Region 1 DVD (Twitch article)