User reviews

I was perhaps lucky to have seen a Hollywood film a few days prior, Alexander Payne's latest and supposedly also about a spiritual journey of sorts and passing for an 'indie'. The comparison is devastating.

The many times Oscar nominated film: airbrushed beauty mistaken for purity. This little obscurity: lyrical breath and pulse from life.

In 1968, there was a film made in Japan called Nanami: Inferno of First Love, also Japanese New Wave about confused, apprehensive youth feeling the first pulls to join the fray of existence: love, pain, loss, all the adult stuff they used to know as words. The fulcrum of that film unraveled from this notion: if you peel a cabbage you get its core, but if you peel an onion? (this is really worth puzzling over btw, in a Zen way, and the film worth seeking out.)

The answer to that very much pertains here. This is the New New Wave: even more visual episodic movements through edges of life, even more radical dislocations from the ordinary world of narrative.

The story is about teenage high school students: cliques and counter-cliques and much tension and drama inbetween them as they discover love and power. This is woven together with a thread about music, revolving around a band named Lily Chou-Chou that is all the rage among youth. Now and then conversations are enacted in some unspecified blogosphere: this is given to us as disembodied words against a black screen. We presume we'll get to know the people behind the nicknames and identify them as one of several youths whose lives we intimately follow in its petty cockiness and idle pleasure, or even worse that they don't matter at all and this is purely ornamental. It is actually much, much deeper.

Now we're lucky this is Japanese, and even perhaps unconsciously so. Typical for New Wave, the world is distinctly modern and vibrant. It is all about youthful rejection. But as with Oshima and the rest back in the 60's, what these guys perhaps don't know is that French film that seemed so radical and appealing to the Japanese at the time and was presumed to have re-invented cinematic grammar, it was built on precisely what the Japanese had first revolutionized about representation in the 18th and 19th century. The calligraphic eye.

So every rejection of tradition that we find in those films, or this one now, only serves to re-discover what was so vital and groundbreaking about Japanese tradition in the first place.

In other words: if the old Zen Masters were alive now, all of them exceptional poets or landscape painters in their day and with a great sense of humor, they would all be New Wave filmmakers.

This is as Zen as possible and in the most pure sense of the term. Transparent images. Vital emptiness. Calligraphic flows to and from interior heart. Mournful beauty about what it means 'to read the love letters sent by the moon, wind, and snow', to quote an old Buddhist poem. Plum blossoms at the gates of suffering.

So this is where it goes deeper than say, a new Malick film. There are no intricate mechanisms to structure life. That is fine but what this film does is even more difficult to accomplish. Just one lush dynamic sweep of a calligrapher's brush that paints people and worlds as they come into being and vanish again. I have never seen for example a film present death so invisibly, so poetically.

So if you peel a cabbage you get a core, but if you peel an onion?

We may be inclined to answer nothing. The film may seem like it was about nothing, at best tears from a teenager's overly dramatic diary. The form mirrors the diary after all, after Jonas Mekas. A whole segment about a trip to Okinawa is filmed with a cheap camcorder.

Let that settle and then consider the following key scene: a choir of students gets together for a school event to sing a capella a complex piano arrangement, Debussy's Arabesque. They had a perfectly capable piano player to do it but wouldn't let her for petty school rivalries. So once more we may be inclined to think that it was too much hassle for something so simple. Adults would never let things reach that stage. A compromise would be made, the piece would be played on the piano, properly.

Now all through the film we see kids listen to music, everyone seems to have his own portable cd-player for that purpose. Presumably they listen to Lily Chou-Chou, who we're told was heavily inspired by Arabesque. We don't actually listen to her. We never see her or the band, at the big concert we're left outside and marvel at a giant video projection: artificial images in place of the real thing.

But in this one occasion the kids achieve something uniquely sublime: they articulate the music, actually embody it, by learning to be their own instruments and each one each other's.

The entire film is the same effort: to embody inner abstract worlds and their 'ether'. The method is rigorous improvisation.

Something to meditate upon.

(This is one of two best films from the decade in my estimation. Incidentally both were shot on digital, our new format for spontaneous discovery).

"All About Lily Chou-Chou" is one of those movies where, having finally made it to the end, I think I should probably watch it again and see if I can actually enjoy or understand it.

Its structure is highly fragmentary, jumping all over the place with different characters and different time-lines. At the end I didn't really know who the characters were. The movie is very well shot, and has a feeling as though something is going on throughout, I was just never able to pin it down.

I don't really know what the plot was about. I got that there was one student who is obsessed with the titular Lily, and he gets bullied. There's also another boy who everyone seems to hate, and perhaps one girl, but I don't know.

I didn't get it, but I came away thinking that there was at least something to be "got". If I re-watch it, hopefully I'll be able to update this review with a more positive score.

"all about lily chou chou" begins with a series of manually keystroked chat-room-style statements that introduce facts and ideas, mostly related to mythical pop-star "lily chou chou." this sort of cinematic introduction sounds similar to many other computer-age-themed films, but amazingly the keystroke dialogue between several anonymous internet fanatics continues past the credits and runs through almost the entire movie. the nicely-scripted, brilliantly executed text acts as the backbone that beautifully holds together a story that is ultimately about many things, including the fragility of relationships and the personas we use based on them, fanatical envy and love contrasted against blind rage and hate, metamorphosis, and technology versus nature.

although executed in an arguably confusing manner, consisting of many non-chronological vignettes, the film ultimately succeeds in depicting a modern-day story involving the relationship between two early-adolescent japanese boys, their journey through life and school, their changing identities, and their fascination with and "connection" to the strangely popular musician, lily chou chou. visually, the filmmaking complements the ideas perfectly. the camera is often puerile and shaky when showing the boys' ventures and conversations. at one point, a vacation sequence is depicted solely through excited and dizzying amateur videography by the boys themselves, humorous close-ups of accompanying girls' bodies included. during the non-video portions of the film, the colors are beautifully rich, with verdant fields and saturated skies.

the abrupt, but fitting pattern between flowing, dreamlike camerawork, shaky camerawork, textual discourse, and the eerily sensual, fictitious lily chou chou tracks provide a momentum that is both refreshing in its originality but effectively discomforting. by the film's closing the style is not so much regretfully confusing as it is fittingly and fully dramatic, as well as both amazing and beautiful. the film is nothing short of art.

lastly, the film did well to keep free of preaching. with much of what goes on in the world today, filmmakers feel social commentary is an added bonus (or even a main goal) to depicting a narrative. this is not so much a problem until the viewer begins to feel manipulated in a propaganda-like fashion. this film is very much based in a realistic society with realistically harsh and shocking issues and occurrences. however, respectfully, this film does a fine job of depicting its characters and events in a manner that allows for the viewer's empathy without pointing direct fingers or offering direct solutions. incidentally, much of the films drama and marvel comes from this quality.

ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU is another film about a fruitless journeys. Though, this plot-less, harrowing, call-for-attention mess is the longest aftertaste I have ever had. Beats any Kubrick film, in which begs me to re-watch it, even if the first time hardly seems to warrant it. But re-watch it for what? Like a Kubrick film, there are no 'humans' here, just gloomy detached children wallowing in an existential void. I feel haunted by this experience, but can't really explain it. And I still think about it after all this time, often yearning for a chance to see it again. Therefore, a film this powerful deserves some attention, but it's likely most will dismiss it immediately and altogether abandon the after-thought process required to appreciate it. Note: I did some research on the director Shunji Iwai, his previous efforts include the acclaimed SWALLOWTAIL AND BUTTERFLY. Turns out that he has a bit of a cult following made up mostly of young film aficionados, whereas the older critics tend to despise his films. Clearly, Iwai's films communicate to a jilted youth culture of Japan, and therefore general Western audiences, young and old alike, inevitably find his films difficult.

The one agreeable thing that can be said about Shunji Iwai is that he makes beautiful images. Lily Chou Chou is his most recent release (and let me state, since someone incorrectly wrote it is pronounced "Choo Choo" it is not, it is spoken "Shoo Shoo"), and one of his most coherent films. For some reason this movie seems to puzzle a lot of people... maybe it is the translation from English to Japanese (I watched the movie in Japanese dialog only, so I don't know if they killed it with subtitles or not), but the movie's plot is really not so complicated. If you know a little bit about Japanese life and culture, the emotions of youth, and devotion to an artist then you can watch this movie and understand it. Even for those who were confused by the plot, another one or two viewing should clear up any misunderstandings. Iwai does have some issues with complicating plot stories, or leaving out plot at all. As a writer he is great, but not perfect. As a director of film and photography he is mind blowing. The images that Iwai creates and displays to the audience are the most beautiful presented. Whether or not the story behind this movie shines to you, the images should be enough to blow your mind. Iwai uses re-occurring themes to present lovely contrasts. He also chose a beautiful selection of music to accompany his film, from Debussy to old Okinawan songs to Lily Chou Chou's own. If you pay attention to the gentle subtleties presented in this film, there is no way you can walk away with your life unchanged. I know this film has changed my life, and has become my main source of inspiration.

I had the pleasure of seeing this movie alone on a quiet weekday night. I wasn't prepared for the power of this film, and how much it would hurt me and inspire me when i saw it.

The film moves fluidly, and seems like a work of art more than entertainment. As we watch we are shown a side of Japanese youth not often seen in such an honest light. This world is shocking and scary, yet there is a comfort in seeing it in such an honest way. Much of the film is short with a music video quality to it, but it is the careful, intimate direction that keeps this film grounded as it shifts from situation to situation. I will not tell much about the story, since any spoiling of the plot might weaken the effect of the first viewing. I can say that this is truly a rare achievement in film, and it deserves to be seen.

This movie is painful to watch, but at times insightful on some mechanisms of social behavioralism and psychology.

I get the bad in pain first. This movie is very experimental, chaotic and hard to follow. It kinda emulates like how life feels for teenager at times. This isn't good for viewer however. It is tiresome and makes it hard to sipher the meaning in the movie (even the basic message) Furthermore the literal cinematography is tiresome, because it is often handheld and chaotic and most of the time not in the favor of the movie.

The good in the pain. This movie forces viewer to look at all the bullying and crime going on, it forces to process it. It shows truly how horrible people can be, and teenagers without comprehensible ethical base can be one of the worse offenders. This shows really how important the adults and societal structures are. Here in this films universe, both are lacking or gone.

There are some slight commentary or "consept dropping" on some japanese societal issues, like the school system. These are mostly snippets and don't really ad any meaning or complexity.

AALCC informs us that 14-year-olds can be pretty obnoxious and vicious. To those who don't know that, the film performs a public service. Otherwise, it's a lot of flashy videography with little or no reason for being. I will allow that the camera-work is sometimes striking, but also that it can be madly self-indulgent at other times. The actors occupy screen space and screen time, but do not compute as compelling human beings. I suppose the e-mail that flashes across the screen throughout means that you have to figure out which character has which moniker, but I simply couldn't tell enough differences to do so, and really didn't care anyway.

This is a tale about the lows of a group of high school kids that turn to crime and cyberspace obsession of a pop singer named Lily Chou-Chou.

Writer/director Shunji Iwai film is complex, dark and depressing, with a real intense feel of teenage angst, but truly it's a beautiful film to watch. Shunji Iwai gives us disturbing images of youth's harrowing experiences, in which some characters you feel for, but then after a while you might suddenly despise or the opposite.

With visually stunning and fresh cinematography, it felt like I was watching an arty music video clip at times. The scenery in the film is lush and exquisite, from the contrast of the alluring islands and the rich grass fields to the harshness of the city and school.

A distinguished and unique soundtrack surrounds and overwhelms the film; the songs we hear are those from the fictional pop singer Lily Chou-Chou. The music really added to the beauty and mystique of this film.

Hayato Ichihara as Yûichi Hasumi, a troubled kid that is involve in a crime gang and under an alias, runs the fan club website about Lily Chou-Chou, Shûgo Oshinari as Shusuke Hoshino, once a top student and then suddenly changes and becomes a gang leader and Ayumi Ito as the quiet Yôko Kuno, an outstanding piano player but because of that she is bullied. The performances are brilliantly absorbing and there are no hiccups to say off.

Since the Lily Chou-Chou Website is an important part of the film, we don't actually see anyone in front of the computer screen, except for Yuichi. Whenever there were conversations on her fan's Website, the user-name and their comment would pop up on the screen throughout different scenes in the film or on a black background, though some of the conversations have no resemblance to what's actually happening on screen. At first some of the people were hard to work out who was who on the net, but still I found it quite intriguing.

The time line in the story goes from the present to past and back to the present, where we learn in detail about Yuichi and Shusuke. There are a couple of surprises that you don't see coming and the story might have its flaws- but they didn't seem to bother me, as I was simply engrossed with the dense context of the film.

Like I typed before this is an haunting and intense tale about teenage angst, there is a lot of agonizing imagery and confronting situations like violence, depression, rape, suicide, prostitution and bullying. This gives it such a grim and disturbing undertone, so it might alienate certain viewers.

For me it was a breath-taking and visually satisfying experience.

5/5

I don't know why I bother with Hollywood when there are so many rich projects like this hiding in corners. The problem of course is finding them. The most significant benefit I get from writing IMDb comments is that readers lead me to them. That happened in this case.

If you are an ordinary viewer , you probably won't like this. Its yet another dip into high school angst, overly long and structurally a bit too cute.

I think you'll have to train yourself to watch films lucidly, but if you do, this will be quite effective. You will fall into it and really be influenced, much more viscerally than say "There Will be Blood," where there is no path for us to enter the world we watch.

The matter of this concerns teen alienation, particularly through how we/they take things that happen and weave them into whatever simple, grand narrative is available — usually through commercial pathways. Its a simple chord to strike, but one we all know, both from when we were that age, and from how we live now, which is only a half degree separated.

You'll encounter death, teen prostitution, rape. Gang dynamics involving intense humiliation. Clueless adults of course. Sexual drives and identity vacuums of course, but subordinated to the more overwhelming urge to be part of a cosmic story. Usually, we ignore this in film, because sex and role are inherently more cinematic. Less true, but easier to show as true.

Its the multiply nested structure that makes it work. The scenes are presented non- linearly. The overriding narrative is not what we see, but a collection of instant messages exchanged among the characters we see. These evoke the images we see, perhaps not as they happened, but as they are recalled. There's an overarching cosmos that these text messages reference, an abstract, perfect world of ethereal dynamics conveyed through a goddess, a girl singer. The slightest nuance from, the smallest bit of news about, the slightest rumor concerning this singer provides ledges for a life, for a whole gaggle of lives bumping up against each other.

In the center of this thing, you have a radical departure. All of a sudden, instead of the camera anchored in the test messages, we have a camera rooted in reality. Its literally footage from video cameras from the core teen boys as they go on an exotic vacation to Okinawa. Naturally, the four spindly 14-15 year olds are guided by four of the most appealing older girls in memory. Its colorful, jerky. Full of life, a real, embodied life that by its appearance makes all the rest of the thing seem incredibly sad in its artificiality.

Someone knew what they were doing when they put this together. Someone deep and true and of the kind we need more of if we are to make it through. Or do I hang my life on commercially available narrative too?

Heh.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

I just watched Lily Chou Chou and I was completely blown away by it. It displayed the struggles of Japanese teens so elegantly. I stayed in Japan for a summer a few years back and attended a high school there. There is a big change going on in Japan's youth today and this is the only time I have seen it portrayed. More films about the real Japan should be made and that's one reason why Iwai is such a good director. He may over do it a little but its what people need to wake up to the struggles in a changing Japan. Americans may think the struggles of being a teen are hard, but Japanese teens have it even harder. Stuck in an extremely difficult academic path without nearly as many choices as we get. That's why escapism through music is so important for them. Its one of their only ways to get out of the social and academic pressures of every day life. The song Glide for me summed up the feeling of the movie. "I wanna be"

The movie addresses a lot of issues that the younger generation in Japan were facing in the early 00's. Japan's crime rate was rising, and a lot of young people sought to the internet as an escape from reality.

It's a 2 hour and 37 minutes long movie, making it seem sort of endless. It also doesn't have a climax which makes it seem a bit purposeless. The movie is not in chronological order, jumping back and forth a lot. This may confuse some viewers, but if you understand the narrative, you'll be able to follow along. The shots are however very beautiful, and is in my opinion peak cinematography.

A lot of people are complaining that Yuichi is a boring character with no character development or interesting personality traits. He's not a good person whom stands up against bullies, and help those whom could really need it, in fact he does the opposite. He gives in to peer pressure, and brings the people he care about into unfortunate situation. But honestly i think this actually makes him more relatable. Most people are not heroes, nor villains. They're just normal people, whom sometimes makes bad decisions (not trying to excuse his), and Yuichi is a great way to highlight this.

The ending of the movie isn't exactly good, but a lot of these problems throughout the movie, is sort of resolved by the end of it.

I watched All About Lily Chou-Chou on about the end of my high school life and I must say that I was moved with the entire story and Shunji Iwai's brilliance.

First off, the music was excellent - Salyu (or Lily) has this ethereal voice that haunts me every time the movie comes into mind, strengthening the entire atmosphere of the movie.

It also shows the usual Japanese high school dimension of bullying which is very common, but the movie just shows a more intense depth to it.

What makes the movie tick for me I guess would be that the main character (Yuuichi) although predominantly a shy and quiet boy, he developed through the various circumstances and thus leads to the end (which I will not spoil.) I can say that the pace of the movie is just enough to make you feel the emotions the characters portray given minimalistic dialogue and instead replaced by revolving BBS messages and lush green scenery.

I give it a 10 out of 10 for everything - cinematography, plot, music. A movie that's so superb like this should be watched by everyone.

It's always difficult to write a review on a piece of art that speaks to you personally. I'm not sure what I'm about to write yet but it may be worth taking it with a pinch of salt, since I'm unable to get over just how much I love this movie.

Even if it doesn't resonate with you, "All About Lily..." is still clearly a film of a high artistic standard. Iwai has succeeded in creating a beautiful atmosphere but one of extreme coldness and sterility. The poster shot of the bright green rice fields, which practically leap off the screen at you, are stunning to look at but evoke such loneliness. It's no wonder Debussy was used on the soundtrack; few other composers can create such beautiful music that sounds so distant, like you can't touch it. The shots of one of the characters playing his pieces on the piano are made to look almost ethereal. Such music and images, coupled with the use of a digital camera which does bizarre things with light (sometimes the camera will be in a room and it looks like the sun is right outside the window), give the film a hypnotic, surreal quality. This is also added to by the fractured narrative which at times seems to be trying to deliberately make you believe the wrong thing.

The acting is unbelievably naturalistic and at times very brave, especially by 13yr old actor Hayato Ichihara (Yuichi) who's deadpan expressiveness reminds me of Montgomery Clift. Oshinari's (Hoshino) is probably the stand-out performance though. He has more to work with, but even so, it's incredible. So intense and human.

The naturalism coupled with Iwai's interest in seemingly trivial, everyday moments means the film conveys an incredible amount of information even when very little appears to be happening on screen. The clue to a character's motivation can be picked up just by watching what they're doing in the background. Rarely do you see a movie treat the audience so intelligently. Nothing is signposted. Nothing is explained. It's just SHOWN to you and your mind is forced to make sense of it.

Finally, I have never seen a movie treat my generation so sensitively and truthfully. You would never see a movie like this made in the West, except maybe by Ken Loach, but then he'd make it like a documentary. "All About Lily..." is nothing like a documentary. The content is naturalistic but the style is pointedly not. That juxtaposition is another thing that makes it so great.

A strange and difficult film, but also an amazing one born from the world of dreams. I think it can best be described as a mood piece. The film runs two and a half hours, and not much really happens plot-wise. But a lot does happen emotionally. The film is about a teenage boy in Japanese junior high school (early to mid teen years) who is caught up in some rather nasty circumstances that occur within his peer group, including robbery, rape and prostitution (the same set of circumstances that brought about a movie like Battle Royale, and you'll recognize some of the character types that the two films share). To escape from the horrors of everyday life, the boy, named Yuichi, listens to the ethereal music of Lily Chou-Chou, and chats about her on the internet. As dark as the subject matter of the film is, its point of view is stuck in the dreaminess of Lily Chou-Chou's music. The hazy digital photography, with its glowing aura, communicates this beautifully – let no one say that digital doesn't have a place in the world of cinema. The film is not cohesive, but it would probably be a mistake if it were. It would lose that haunting tone that makes it so special. It's outstanding.

ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU (pronounced "shoo-shoo") is Shunji Iwai's ambitious paeon to rougher high-school days, a coming-of-age film that confronts the bullying problem that has apparently become endemic in many Japanese schools. One certainly cannot fault the film's willingness to confront certain social realities in imaginative ways.

The LILY in the title is a pop singer whose songs about alienation and pain affect a disillusioned group of high school kids who stay in touch, for the most part anonymously, thanks to a computer chat room. Pop songs offer escape from a gray, sadistic school life. And they have a lot to escape from. Bullies humiliate their prey through rape, humiliation, torture, ostracization, burglary and violence; the worst of the girls have no problem setting up one of their most talented and beautiful girls for a gang-rape and hazing. The screenplay was purportedly co-written by students, but it's difficult to know the dividing line between "reality" and invention.

It's rough stuff -- and also rife with pretense. This story of feral youth has lots of jiggly hand-held shots, raw video, and chatroom inserts, with the intention of offering a disjointed narrative. All it does is mangle the film's already jumbled narrative. To Iwai, it's all just survival of the fittest, whether in remote Okinawa or during a high school break, but the delivery and substance if the film combine to make you, at times, feel nauseous.

But the photography, at its best, can be striking, and the concept of using technological devices to color the narrative is interesting, at least at the beginning. Finally, I ended up bored - and that's the one thing that even a bad film can't afford to be.

Lilly Chou-Chou is quite a perculiar movie experience, there is no over riding message, there is no moment to reflect, everything that this movie expresses appears in an instance and then is lost again in the great 'ether'. Throughout I felt lost, not merely due to the disjointed narrative but the pacing and overall premise did not register to me as 'a movie'. Trying to find meaning in Lilly Chou-Chou is similar to attempting to find meaning in ambient electronic music, as we watch the movie we are detached, the story, so to speak, unfolds gracefully but the audience can not relate to the characters, but can only attempt to make sense of it all.

Lilly Chou-Chou is in my opinion a great achievement of movie making, interms of acting, editing, sound mixing and visual flair, fans of cinema are treated to something entirely fresh, but there is the overall feeling of dissatisfaction, I wanted more from the story, I wanted to see more of the characters, more of their lives and their interaction with one another. Yet the director withholds much of this from the viewer, choosing to present the characters relationships with one another in small doses, leaving the visuals and sound to complement the rest. And this I feel is one of the dissapointments of this movie, so much is conveyed yet so little is actually on screen, the watching of this movie requires a level of understanding of emotions, and the viewer is called upon to make sense of it all.

This would be the movies strongest point, and one of its weakneses. I urge anyone with a curiosity for this movie to watch it.

This is a film that makes you feel more than it makes you think. Combination of poetic images and magnificent music takes you to a new level of emotion. Iwai used emotional space of each characters as well as physical space very well throughout the entire film, it is hard not to make connection with them. This is what the cinema is all about in my humble opinion. Emotions be felt by images and sound.