Compared to today's Tokyo, where teenagers quietly curate their Instagram feeds in Starbucks and tourists happily snap selfies from the middle of Shibuya Crossing, the 1990s were a wilder, freer time.
Shibuya was then the domain of the kogyaru, teenage girls who cheekily flouted traditional norms in everything from the white "loose" socks that clumped around their ankles to enjo kōsai, compensated dates with randy guys old enough to be their fathers. And then there were the ganguro — young women who took the kogyaru look, including dyed hair and sprayed-on tans, to bizarre extremes. Ridiculed as aliens from another planet, they waved their freak flags high.
"Sunny," Hitoshi One's exuberant, if repetitive, remake of a 2011 Korean film of the same title, celebrates the late '90s in Tokyo from the perspective of six women who were once a kogyaru posse. Though intended as generational nostalgia, it also shows the darker side of the era, without framing its young heroines as passive victims, and is full of infectious energy, meticulous period detail and laugh-out-loud gags — all trademarks of director One, who made his box-office breakthrough, the hit rom-com "Love Strikes!," in 2011.