All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001, Shunji Iwai)
Supposedly the first Japanese film shot in 24p digital video, which accounts for its unique look, esp. the wild color in outdoor scenes, but also its annoying handheld shakiness which would become widespread by the end of decade. The middle/high-school kids are obsessed with pop singer Lily (according to shady IMDB trivia, inspired by Faye Wong), are also incredibly shitty to each other. Prime focus is on two boys, Hoshino and Hasumi, former friends but now tormentor and tormented. Each has his own problems at school, but is secretly (and online, hidden behind screen names) deeply moved by Lily’s music. At the end, I think (nothing is quite clear, at least not to me) the bullied Hasumi, denied entrance to Lily’s concert by Hoshino, knifes the bully to death after also discovering that Hoshino is junior member “blue cat” on the forum. And I’m thinking young Hasumi is forum admin “philia,” but again, not sure.
Hoshino with Hasumi over his shoulder:
Forum posts appear in the middle of the movie screen, sometimes overlapping the scene but usually just white text over black. This should get tiresome (it did for reviewers, I see) but I never got sick of the texting conceit or the length of the movie (hello, Noriko’s Dinner Table), just of the brutality between/among the kids. Just as I’m never visiting Italy after watching Gomorrah, I am never attending middle school in Japan after watching this
Bad girls:
I love that outdoor night scenes are shot with big green spotlights on the actors, complete with obvious shadows. It’s stylish and effective. In the middle of the movie, Hoshino and friends use stolen money to go on vacation to Okinawa, leading to a lengthy, punishing overuse of the handheld aesthetic.
Movie had a few beautiful moments, a few embarrassing ones (middle school was terrible, and I used to talk that way about music I loved), but mostly I felt like I’m about ten years too old to be watching it and wondered if the people putting it on their best-of-decade lists weren’t all 17 in 2001.
Suicidal Shiori Tsuda:
Older boy Hoshino: Shugo Oshinari was in Battle Royale II. Other boy, Hasumi, Hayato Ichihara stars – stars! in Miike’s new God’s Puzzle. The girl who’s raped and shaved bald (did I mention it’s a cruel movie?), Kuno, is Ayumi Ito of nothing else I’ve heard of, and the girl who’s coerced into prostitution, Shiori Tsuda, played a title character in the director’s follow-up, Hana and Alice. After that, I lose track of which kid was which, and, in fact, what happened and when. Reviewers mention the jumbled timeline of the story, and I thought it was linear so I obviously missed more than I realized. I did like it overall, but I don’t think I’ll ever be watching it again to get my facts straight.
Shaved Kuno:
Reverse Shot:
Iwai returns to the image of students standing alone in glowworm-green fields, attached to headphones. It’s risky, a consummate music-video image, especially with Iwai’s phosphorescent digital palette, and I’m not even sure it ever entirely escapes that. But with its repetition after the murder at the end of the movie—one of the students standing and listening is Shugo, killed a few minutes earlier—these Elysian fields come to replace the traditional blackout’s “return” to reality out of the dream life of cinema. As the text of credits are superimposed, the uniquely personal experience of these lonely bucolic listeners becomes inseparable from the chat rooms and concerts, where they are unified with that pop-culture infinite—the fan base. As if communing with an angel across great distances but with special intimacy, the students and Lily Chou-Chou contain one another as they share that experience with millions.
Rouge:
Tags: 2000s, japan, Shunji IwaiWhat is interesting, however, is that the film not only does not proffer to give answers but, intentionally or otherwise, feeds into our bafflement, in two ways. Firstly, the world in Lily is presented as one in which not only are its teenagers behaving as such, but its adults are also, at best, powerless, ignorant and, at worst, in complicity. Witnessing the ostracising of the class pianist, the teacher capitulates to the persecution by entreating the bullies to perform and promising that the pianist will play no part. A female teacher’s only response to the assaulted Kuno (Ayumi Ito), now also shaven, is to offer her a wig.
…
All About Lily Chou-Chou transforms into a mood piece, self-consciously eschewing account and explanation, less concerned with analysing our bafflement than it is with simply our bafflement itself, as if with the detached curiosity of an observing alien.
vic said,
January 4, 2012 @ 1:10 pm
first of all,sorry for my broken english and limited vocabulary. it’s not my first language. what i what to say is this:
**just because teens happen to enjoy a particular movie a lot , doesn’t always mean that it’s a “teen” movie.
**just because a grown up doesn’t like a movie with young actors in it doesn’t necesarily mean that
the movie was for a young audience.
I don’t know but i have the feeling that you already know these things, honestly. And yet here I am planning to write 30 lines that would contradict this statement. I guess I’m not sure enough.
“the social network”. teens rated it highly because it’s about facebook, a website they “love”, but they’re not able to go beyond that superficial aspect, to see the real reasons why it’s a brilliant film : great way of story telling,great directing, the political aspects of the story ,the moral aspects and on. the fact that it’s a great piece of filmmaking is irrelevant for the youth… for them it only matter that…you know…it’s about facebook therefore it’s a “cool” movie.
requiem for a dream : teens love that movie ,you know? they watch that movie “stoned”, and they’re proud about it. i mean jeesus christ, i’m sorry but how immture can you be to be proud of the fact that you are stoned while watching an anti-drug movie? clearly they don’t understand what the movie is trying to say ; they only like the fact that drugs are being used in the movie.what about the brilliant message/soundtrack/performances/editing, why don’t they enjoy those things the movie offered?
Having said that, i don’t agree with you when you said that people who put ‘all about lily chou chou’ on their “best movies of the decade” must be 17 years old teens. Teens enjoy ‘all about lily chou chou’ very much,yes,but their reasons for liking it are quite puerile : they like the movie NOT because they appreciate art in filmmaking; they like it simply because they can connect with the fucked-up characters ,or simply because they like japanese pop ,or because of the goodlooking cast (i’m talking about the fangirls of course).
kids aged 17 are not yet able to appreciate this kind of art film,they have to grow up first (and even after they’ll grow up, most part of them will stick to holywood brainless movies unfortunately). i think you’re wrong to assume that this movie is for the teens,when in fact it’s quite the contrary : this is a true art film FOR mature audiences,only that it was targeted at the teens in order to make more money,for the profit. It’s a movie about how fucked up the japanese modern society really is, but teens..they don’t see it that way so of course they enjoy it for the reasons mentioned above.
you’re never ten years too old to enjoy a good movie.