by ·Comments Off on Shorts so far, 2010

A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

Slow-panning shots outside looking in, but mostly inside looking out. Unique location (Nabua village in Thailand) but also unique photography style. I wonder if another filmmaker could’ve found images half as strong as these. As for the story, well, as usual with A.W. I don’t really get it. The village has a history of violence and repression, and this (fictional?) uncle is unseen, addressed by a narrator. Actually it’s more than one narrator, reading the same script, which is later critiqued for accuracy of dialect as we continue roaming the houses, looking slowly up at the trees. Makes me want to catch up with A.W.’s features that I’ve missed. Later: So I have, with Syndromes and a Century. Its dialogue repetition and shots of trees from inside buildings reminded me of this short.

Academic Hack:

In a stunning act of political avant-gardism, Joe has adapted Thai Buddhist tenets regarding reincarnation as a means for excavating the hidden history of a troubled landscape. As his camera slowly creeps and pans through darkened, abandoned homes, Apichatpong is displaying the remnants of a repressed past, in an assertion of ghostly, vertical time. … Joe’s dominant visual cue throughout Boonmee is the depiction of dark, illegible interiors whose porous walls and broken-out windows allow the bright green of the jungle to puncture the once-domestic space with light and texture. As beautiful as the effect may be, it is also chilling, since it represents the breakdown of human effort’s separation from natural encroachment, the dissolution of basic boundaries.

–
We Work Again (1937)

A newsreel short about how “we” (meaning black americans, though it sounds like the regular white studio voiceover guy saying “we”) are finding jobs after the depression – mostly jobs in the arts, thanks to the federal works agency. Contains rare footage of Orson Welles’ “Voodoo Macbeth,” which used all black actors and looks like it could’ve used a higher prop budget.

image

–
The Little White Cloud That Cried (2009, Guy Maddin)

Commissioned for a Jack Smith program. It reminded me of Kenneth Anger, with the classic pop songs strung together, the soft-focus closeups, but that’s probably because I barely know anything about Jack Smith. Lots (lots!) of nudity, largely (maybe entirely) transsexuals. Typical Maddin editing (which is to say: exhilarating). It’s either art or the best porno I’ve ever seen.

image

Someone got the filmmaker by accident. He looks so intense!
image

Send Me To The ‘Lectric Chair (2009, Guy Maddin)

No credits. Need to get a copy someday without interlacing. Made for the Rotterdam festival for an outdoor exhibit. Isabella is in the ‘lectric chair. A man rushes to save her, too late, embraces her as the switch is pulled. Charming homemade effects: tin foil, sparklers and exercise equipment. Louis Negin (reused footage from Glorious?) dances shirtless in celebration!

Maddin: “Now, I was immediately told no nudity, I was immediately told no strobing, so strobing became the new taboo. It would throw the citizens of Rotterdam into epileptic fits flipping on the sidewalks.”

image

More, from a simply fantastic interview with Maddin: “My condition for doing it was that I got permission to re-use the footage in my next feature. Whenever I accept a short film commission, I get permission to use the footage from it and so I’m slowly assembling clips… and in this financially depressed time, you need to. It’s a Frankenstein feature film built together from a bunch of dead short commissions.”

image

–
Zoo (1962, Bert Haanstra)

One of the greatest short films ever. He must have shot for days and days to get so many great shots of animals and spectators, then associatively edited them together into a docu-comedy. I learned from the ravingly positive writeup on the official Bert site that it was all filmed with a hidden camera.

image

–
Contact (2009, Jeremiah Kipp)

Boy and girl visit dealer, get bottled drug and take it together naked. Bad trip ensues. Girl’s concerned parents wait at home, until she shows up late, hugs daddy. Very little spoken dialogue – for artistic sake, or with international film fest distribution in mind? Heavy-handed sound design with echoey shock-horror effects with a sidetrack into 8-bit glitch noise.

image

–
The Bookworm (1939, Hugh Harman)

The crappiest little time-filler of an MGM cartoon. Can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy these as a set, so may as well parcel ’em out as bonus content on other discs. Poe’s raven wants to catch a bookworm (that’s a worm who eats books) to put in the Macbeth witches’ cauldron, but the worm is saved by characters from other books, with a complete lack of imagination, not even the har-har caricature value of those not-great Tashlin library shorts. Why would the books want to save a bookworm anyway? This seems an important part of the story, and it’s just ignored. Ted on IMDB overthinks the movie, says it’s “amazingly sophisticated in its abstraction,” no kidding. A Tashlin movie would just blow Ted’s head right off. Harman put more effort into the same year’s classic short Peace On Earth.

–
Love On Tap (1939, George Sidney)

At least with The Bookworm you can tune out the story and watch the animation, but there’s no joy in this one. Well, it’s a musical short so I guess you’ve got dancing, but that’s not much of an attraction. Story goes this dude is trying to marry a gal who leads a dance troupe, but her dancers are whiny dependent brats and she caters to their every whim, putting off the guy until he threatens to leave instead of marrying her. He should’ve. Sidney later directed celebrated musicals like Annie Get Your Gun and Kiss Me Kate… guess you gotta start somewhere.

–
Michelangelo Eye to Eye (2004, Michelangelo Antonioni)

Antonioni silently contemplates the work of another Michelangelo. 15 minutes of static or slowly tracking shots, with just room noise until an ethereal choir sings us out into the credits. Nice to see that after all these years, M.A. is still filming people dwarfed by giant structures and pillars.

image

–
Wake Up, Freak Out, Then Get a Grip (2008, Leo Murray)

A cute cartoon illustrating how we’re all going to die from global warming. Only Leo doesn’t say we’ll all die, he says all the good species of animals will die, leaving rats and roaches, and since there won’t be enough resources left for all of us, those with the most guns and lowest morals will survive to slaughter the rest. Then he says we can’t stop things by being jolly good consumers and buying fluorescent bulbs, we must rather campaign our governments and friendly local corporations to smarten up. Not likely! Move inland.

by ·Comments Off on Shoot ’em Up (2007, Michael Davis)

Take Clive Owen and give him a gun and you’ve got The International, I guess. But give him and everyone else lots and lots of guns and you have this, which must be an improvement. I don’t know how Davis (director of two dorm comedies and a monster-truck thriller) landed Owen, Paul Giamatti as a sneering baddie, or the budget to make a big-ass action movie, but he’s made the most of it – ambitious, gleefully unrealistic action scenes – and good thing, too, since it might be his last chance (it died at the box office).

Did anyone even envision Paul Giamatti appearing in a scene like this?
image

Clive rescues a baby (hello, Children of Men) which is possibly a clone of a senator who backs gun control, so a gun company (led by Pontypool‘s Stephen McHattie) is trying to have the clone-baby killed? Something like that. Anyway, Clive kills two people with carrots (he has a thing for carrots) so I’m not thinking the plot details make a big difference. Besides the carrots, it’s full of terrible 80’s-throwback one-liners, and terrible 80’s-throwback gender politics – any women are either moms (Ramona Pringle, killed early) or prostitutes (Monica Bellucci of those Matrix sequels).

I love the low-tech tape deck they use for the ol’ fake-baby trick:
image

by ·2 Comments

After an opening monologue about not understanding life or people, and not really wanting to understand them, hours and hours of home movies! Mekas in voiceover assures us they are edited in “random” order, but chapter 8 starts with a shot of a campbells soup can, then we glimpse Warhol on a ferry a minute later, so it’s not as random as he’d like us to think. Not randomly selected, either… each is a scene from the previous 30-or-so years chosen for its “glimpses of beauty.” So even though it seems weird to release home movies, with details a hundred times more meaningful to Mekas and his family than to a distant viewer like myself, it’s edited for wide appeal so really very nice.

image

I don’t mean to represent the entire five-hour film with a screenshot of Andy Warhol, it’s just that I was watching on the TV then I moved into the kitchen for ten minutes and brought the movie with me (miracles of technology) and happened to grab this frame.

There’s also sped-up film, rapid editing and some superimpositions – not just untouched boring ol’ film footage. His voiceover isn’t concise, but he has plenty of time. “I’m not so sure what I’m doing, really.”

I like that he keeps calling us his friends.
Or maybe he thought only his friends would ever watch this.

Alternate title: Children and Cats (Sped Up)

The sound quality could use a boost. I recognized Allen Ginsberg, and titles introduce Hollis Frampton, P. Adams Sitney, Nam June Paik, Ken Jacobs and Richard Serra.

I’m guessing it was New Yorkers (more specifically, regulars at the Anthology Film Archives) who voted this a decade-best film. Seems like it’d have added significance for a New Yorker.

Recommended listening: “Springtime in New York” by Jonathan Richman

“That moment everything came back to me, in fragments.”
Some repeated title cards (like “This is a political film”) and the chapter headers give it a sense of structure.

Random dude on IMDB:
“This is the work of a man at peace with his own happiness. We should all be so lucky.”

Mekas explains himself:

My film diaries 1970-1979: my marriage, children are born, you see them growing up. Footage of daily life, fragments of happiness and beauty, trips to France, Italy, Spain, Austria. Seasons of the year as they pass through New York. Friends, home life, nature, unending search for moments of beauty and celebration of life friendships, feelings, brief moments of happiness. Nothing extraordinary, nothing special, things that we all experience as we go through our lives.

NY Times:

At almost five hours, the movie is brief only when compared with Mr. Mekas’s 78 years of life. The film is a first — the home movie as epic. With its intentionally rough-hewn cuts, it is a journal, with hand-typed titles interspersed throughout that skitter past like lightning flashes and are meant to evoke moments. It’s a fleeting storm of a film, with pockets of rhythms that suggest the ebb and flow of a naturally unfolding event — though for some, its length may call for coffee and blankets.

by ·Comments Off on Eureka (2000, Shinji Aoyama)

A long, strange trip. Well, not that strange compared to other Japanese movies I’ve seen, but didn’t go in any direction I expected. The beginning (which I’ve watched before) shows a hijacker killing off hostages before getting taken out by the police, leaving only the bus driver (the great Kôji Yakusho, who himself played a kidnapper in Tokyo Sonata) and two kids alive. Now we’ve got over three hours left to follow these three depressed individuals as they do nothing much. Oh, and it’s all b/w sepia-toned, which I thought was supposed to correlate to the survivors’ sense of distance from the world around them, the current moment already seeming like a faded postcard, confirmed when it turns to color as the girl lightens up in the final scene.

image

Anyway, after the incident bus driver Makoto is disappearing for months at a time and working low-ambition jobs, while the children (Kozue and her older brother Naoki) are on their own after one parent leaves and the other dies… so Makoto moves in with them, soon joined by the kids’ older cousin Akihiko (Yôichirô Saitô of The Mourning Forest) on summer break from classes. Nothing happens, so Makoto buys a bus and the four tour the countryside where nothing continues to happen. Except young women are getting murdered wherever they go. Makoto is suspected, but he catches Naoki red-handed and turns him in. Akihiko, pretty much the only one of them who ever says anything, says that past traumas always cause people to contemplate murder (a dubious theory), but he makes M. angry and gets kicked out of the bus. Cathartic ending, Kozue speaking for the first time in ages, turn to color, etc.

image

Weird, the young girl Aoi Miyazaki seems to play the same character in Aoyama’s Sad Vacation, as do a couple other actors. After watching this and the director’s made-for-TV Mike Yokohama flick, I don’t think I’ll be renting Sad Vacation in a big hurry. Got nothing against long, slow, monochrome movies about sad people (hello, Bela Tarr), but Aoyama’s particular sad people aren’t doing it for me.

image

by ·2 Comments

“Beloved be the one who sits down.”

image

I heard this was a Scandinavian deadpan comedy, so half expected something in the Kaurismaki/Jarmusch vein, tempered by my recent memory of the unexpected Holocaust content in Andersson’s short World of Glory. At first I found this understated to a fault, and not funny at all, but I was fascinated by the composition and content of each scene. Seemed like a depressive view of various social ills (including religion, ha). But I spun the disc again with commentary and caught on to the humor and overall themes. Really, if I had the time and inclination, I should watch EVERY movie twice before talking about it. Ultimately, Songs gets closer to the first half of Playtime than anything else I’ve seen, in terms of directorial obsession with sets and compositions in what’s supposed to be a comedy. But unlike Playtime, this one seems more admirable than enjoyable. Has its moments of pleasure, but when dude is fat, broke, unloved and literally haunted by ghosts at the end it doesn’t send ’em out laughing.

image

A magician performs the ol’ saw trick poorly, sending a man to the hospital and leaving him unable to do anything without pain. Government finance ministers lose their paperwork and instead peer into a crystal ball. A young girl is ritually sacrificed at a quarry in front of a thousand spectators. At the airport there’s a slow-motion oversized-luggage exodus. Best of all, military leaders visit the country’s former commander-in-chief in a rest home on his 100th birthday, and the senile man responds to the official-looking activity with a smiling nazi salute, embarrassing everyone in the room.

image

Eventually a central character emerges: Kalle, with two sons, one of whom “wrote poetry until he went nuts.” Kalle has burned his business down for the insurance money. He doesn’t seem to have a goal until, pursued by the ghost of a man he owed money, he joins a friend’s doomed business selling Jesus crosses for the millennium. At the end Kalle stands facing us before a Jesus-cross dumping-ground as the ghost plus a hundred others rise from the ground and slowly approach from behind. Andersson definitely has a knack for striking images.

image

Andersson, from the commentary:

“This movie is about power, the abuse of power and highhandedness.” I love filmmaker quotes that begin with “this movie is about…”

“I want a scene or a film to surprise the viewer,” he says, exactly as a nude housewife walks into the room.

image

“People have wondered how to classify my film. Absurdism or surrealism… what the hell is it? This film introduces a style that I’d like to call ‘trivialism’. Life is portrayed as a series of trivial components. My intention is to touch on bigger, more philosophical issues at the same time. Life is full of trivia, after all.”

image

by ·Comments Off on Home (2009, Yann Arthus-Bertrand)

On one hand, I thought this was a bad movie.

image

The script seems to have been written for fourth graders, and every camera shot is from a helicopter so you start to get the feeling that all the slow gliding movements are on purpose and you’re watching a giant slow-motion Bollywood video. Narrator Glenn Close throws huge numbers and statistics at us until they become meaningless.
“faster and faster…”
“billions and billions…”
“There’s no time to be a pessimist.”
The slow pace, lingering on each beautiful helicopter shot, and precious repetition-heavy voiceover stinks of pretentiousness, as does the stereotypical music (the kinds of howling African female singers that Martha Wainwright listens to). Sometimes the music turns new-agey, and the voiceover says stuff like “The earth is a miracle. Life remains a mystery,” I’m thinking as a concession to hippie-minded creationists. I wasn’t sure if the doc advocates vegetarianism as part of its packaged hippie agenda or because meat is actually worse for the earth than veggies. And in the length between cuts, I had time to reflect on the irony of a conservationist riding over the whole globe in a helicopter. Maybe their copter ran on biofuel, but more likely they paid a farmer in bolivia a dollar fifty to plant some trees then declared their film “carbon-neutral” in the credits.

image

But speaking of the credits, jeez, this was shot in twice as many countries as The Fall, and there’s no doubt that the visuals are amazing, especially in the high-def version that I watched. And the point of the movie is to keep the viewer hooked with these visuals while impressing upon us how severely we have destroyed the earth (for people like me who missed that Al Gore doc), and what consequences we will soon face. Glenn Close tells me that “humanity has no more than ten years to reverse the process,” then I turn off the movie and, no shit, read the headline “global warming skeptics growing in numbers,” along with the usual business about war, politics and health care. A few windmills in Florida are not gonna be enough to forestall the wrath of Glenn Close’s global-warming pandemic.

image

We are severely screwed. Movie ends up being scarier than Collapse, Wolf Creek and Martyrs combined. I bought ice cream.

image

by ·Comments Off on Ten / 10 on Ten (Abbas Kiarostami)

I think I get Ten, that it’s a discussion between everyday people about their real problems, somewhat politically charged but mostly a realist drama minus much of the drama, with two digital cameras bolted inside a car. He says the story could be anyone’s story, and that anyone’s story would be worth filming for a movie. I didn’t dislike it, but I prefer Kiarostami’s other work, or the kind of scripted social dramas that Jafar Panahi makes (or made, since he’s currently in prison).

At the center of the movie, a mother gets in terrible arguments with her son who resents her for divorcing his father. We also have scenes (exactly ten total, each with countdown leader) with the woman’s sister, a prostitute who accidentally hops into the car (the most contrived part of this realist experiment) and an old woman hitching a ride to pray (the least contrived – reportedly she was really hitching a ride, and had no idea she was appearing in a movie).

image

Better is the documentary 10 on Ten, or I should say it’s better to watch them both together, as A.K. explains in-depth his thoughts on filmmaking, actors, writing and so forth. The doc opens where he shot the end of Taste of Cherry, the hill with winding paths and the distictive trees, which overlooks the streets of Tehran, where he shot Ten. He talks about the immediacy of video, its portability and ability to capture natural performances, which he used by accident in Cherry after the final scene was botched by the film lab, then halfway on purpose in ABC Africa. “This camera allows artists to work alone again.”

He no longer writes screenplays, just sketches his movies over a few pages. “I only remain faithful to the original idea of the film, and even that is not something you can be sure of. When I write a full and accurate screenplay, I’m no longer interested in making it, and usually hand them over to colleagues.” Hence Crimson Gold the year after Ten came out. The shocker is the last chapter of 10 on Ten, a miracle of an ending involving ants in a hole in the road, reviving my faith (shaken by Ten) that A.K. can make cinema out of anything.

image

E. Hayes:

Ten centres on a divorced woman and her relationship with her son, Amin. The actress Mania Akbari is herself a divorcee, and Amin is her own son. We watch the son, without inhibition in the way today’s children can be with parents, caught between his separated mother and father in their battle for possession, self-possession and respect. Through the mother’s struggles with the child, a little tragedy is played out. Pride and possessiveness make communication hideously painful. Meanwhile, various aspects of womanhood are embodied by the women who catch a lift with Akbari. This is a drama of the deferred nature of human fulfilment – a tragedy most people in any audience are all too able to identify with, in any country.

lead actress Mania Akbari:

This film, in my opinion, talks about how relationships today are empty and distant from love. All women in the world, and men for that matter, thirst for love. This film isn’t anti-men. Relationships have become transactions, have become materialist. I think this is what the film shows.

by ·Comments Off on The White Ribbon (2009, Michael Haneke)

I read very little about this, conscious of spoilers, but certain things, as with Antichrist, were unavoidably overheard (or given away in the trailer). So I knew it was set near the start of WWI and that the evil children in the trailer represent the birth of fascism, but I didn’t realize how subtly that point is made. There are unexplained events, the children increasingly seem responsible, then some major characters disappear and the narrator leaves town, with no ends neatly tied up.

Two things for sure: it’s an excellent movie and the camerawork (DP Christian Berger, his fifth with Haneke) is perfect, beating Cache by a mile. Apparently was shot digitally, in color, then post-processed. Very classic feel to the entire production, except to the acting, especially of the children, which is better than anything from the WWI or WWII eras (sorry, Wild Boys of the Road). Won awards almost everywhere (the BAFTAs preferred A Prophet and oscars preferred something from Argentina), beating out Basterds, Antichrist and Wild Grass at Cannes.

image

Interesting to have a non-omniscient narrator, schoolteacher Christian Friedel, who goes on long sidetracks from the town mysteries to chase after a girl, nanny of the baron’s young twins. Town authority figures are painted as corrupt. The doctor (Rainer Bock, small role in Inglorious Basterds) is abusive and perverse to his daughter and to his girlfriend (Susanne Lothar, lead in Funny Games). The pastor (Burghart Klaussner, was just in The Reader) is a tyrannical father. The baron (Ulrich Tukur, The Lives of Others) exercises his power to throw families into poverty at will. The children don’t exhibit the usual responses of sullenness, fighting and petty power games, but band together to commit acts of planned vengeance, terrifying the town. Their crimes go officially undiscovered and unpunished at the end, Haneke’s point, I suppose, being that they grew into fascists and nazis.

image

There is, of course, an absolute ton written about this movie already. The Times says “it lacks the intellectual and emotional nuance that would make this largely joyless world come to life,” but that’s just the common criticism that Haneke’s films are cold and unfeeling, which applies less to this film than to his others so I don’t see the point in bringing it up.

Indiewire: “With this detailed exploration of anonymous retribution, Haneke returns to the haunting terrain he last explored in Cache, although in this case, the retribution expands from a personal level to a larger critique of religious zealotry. … However, these events remain notably off-screen. Absence in The White Ribbon is the quality that makes it a harrowing work of art, rather than a historical soap opera.”

Salon: “It definitely can’t be reduced to a fable about the roots of fascism. The White Ribbon is a dense account of childhood, courtship, family and class relations in a painfully repressed and repressive society, which seems to channel both early Ingmar Bergman and the Bad Seed/Children of the Corn evil-tot tradition.”

image

Haneke:

The film opens with the narrator saying, “I’m not sure if the story I’m about to tell you corresponds to what actually took place. I can only remember it dimly. I know a lot of the events only through hearsay.” So both those elements, then, raise mistrust in the audience as to the accuracy of what they’re going to be seeing, and the reality of what they’re going to be seeing. Both the black-and-white and the use of a narrator lead the audience to see the film as an artifact, and not as something that claims to be an accurate depiction of reality.

It’s only in mainstream cinema that films explain everything, and claim to have answers for anything that happens. In reality, we know so little about what happens. It’s far more productive for me to confront the audience with a complex reality that mirrors the contradictory nature of human experience.

I remember with my first film that was shown in Cannes, The Seventh Continent, there was a screening and afterward we had a discussion. The first question came from a woman who stood up and asked, “Is life in Austria as awful as that?” She didn’t want to accept the difficult questions being raised in the film, so she tried to limit them to a specific place and say, “That’s not my problem.” You could make the same mistake with this film, if you see it as only being about a specific period.

image

by ·1 Comment

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:
image

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:
image

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.

image

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:
image

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:
image

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.

image

Rouge:

What 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.