Review of His Motorbike, Her Island

A carefree rural girl meets a hot-headed young biker riding through her island hometown and gets obsessed about riding a motorcycle, especially his 750cc Kawasaki. The narrative starts from a failed urban romance and culminates into another almost teenager-ish melodramatic love story. Although the dialogue are often cheesy and the narrative is often interrupted by musical interludes, this film has a certain esoteric quality to it, perhaps due to this strange mix. The director (famous for "House", "The Girl Who Cut Time" and the recent "Hanagatami") frequently mixed colour and black-and-white footage with abundance. They perhaps added some dreamy quality into all of this - although personally I felt a lot of it were unnecessary. The camerawork was brilliant, with beautiful riding sequences that stay in the viewer's mind. Definitely not close to any kind of cinematic gem, but it is not easy to quickly forget this lesser-known oddity either.