Girl Boss Guerilla

Sachiko leads a girl gang in Shinjuku. She takes her crew to Kyoto and sets out to bring the local girl gangs under her. The existing order in the city does not accept it, and the local yakuza get involved as well. Sachiko moves forward by fighting, by bargaining, and by trusting nobody. Norifumi Suzuki's film is one of the best known entries in the girl-gang series Japan produced in the early seventies. The genre sits in a place where it puts women at the centre and at the same time turns them into a spectacle; the film uses sexual violence and nudity as commercial material, and that is uncomfortable now. Against that, Miki Sugimoto's hard, unsmiling performance and the use of colour make it one of the more solid examples of its kind.