As a teenager I raided my older brother’s CD collection. When he found me out, I was terrified he’d be angry, but instead he handed me a stack of records. He noticed I was checking out Nine Inch Nails, and told me I could have his albums. As a moody teenager, I couldn’t have received a better gift—a musical refuge from the stress of school and my burgeoning issues with depression. Watching the recent remaster of the movie Linda Linda Linda this weekend brought me back to that experience of my teenage years, when music could really save your life.
Linda Linda Linda is about four Japanese girls putting a band together to play at their school’s festival. After deciding to cover a bunch of songs by the legendary Japanese punk band The Blue Hearts, they select their vocalist at random. It turns out Son, played by the wonderful Bae Doona in an early role, is a Korean exchange student who barely speaks Japanese. That’s just the most visible piece of drama going on within the band: Kyoko, the drummer, has a crush on her classmate and isn’t courageous enough to tell him; bass player Nozomi, part of the real life band Base Ball Bear, keeps falling asleep in school because of their late night practice sessions; Kei has been fighting with her friend Rinko and they both refuse to make up with each other.
None of these conflicts are the main thrust of the film, which is mostly concerned with whether or not the girls will be ready to perform in three days. The scenes flow along lazily, like the last couple days of school before summer as we get brief glimpses into the lives of the band members. The one thing that aligns this group of misfits is the music they’re making together—especially for Son, who doesn’t have any other friends. As they sing “Linda Linda” by The Blue Hearts over and over, the lyrics from the intro of the song take on new meaning: “like a rat, I want to be beautiful, because there’s a kind of beauty that can’t be photographed.”
Watching this movie made me feel an intense but pleasant nostalgia, emphasized by the guitar-based score for the movie, composed by The Smashing Pumpkins’ James Iha. It brought me back to a time when the most important thing in my life was whether or not my friends were mad at me, and sneaking into my brother’s room to steal his CDs. Music, and the friendships I’ve made through music, is all of that version of my life that remains.
Linda Linda Linda opens with students from the high school making a documentary about their festival. “Don’t let anyone tell you that when you grow up, you stop being kids,” one of the students says into the camera. “We’ve only got a little more time to be the real us.”
