Once there, Shusuke has a traumatic near-death experience and his personality changes from good-natured to dangerous and manipulative. The kendo club summer camp training is tough, and Shusuke, Yuichi and some other first-grade boys decide to take a trip to Okinawa. Yuichi mistakes Shusuke's attractive young mother for his sister. Shusuke's family is wealthy in comparison to Yuichi's family. Shusuke and Yuichi meet and become friends when they join the kendo club, and Shusuke invites Yuichi to stay over at his house. In elementary school, Shusuke was one of the best students in school, but was picked on by his classmates. The film has a discontinuous storyline, starting midway through the story, just after the second term of junior high school begins, then flashes back to the first term and summer vacation, and then skips back to the present. "Lily Chou-Chou" has been compared by some to Truffaut's " The 400 Blows," which was also stylistically groundbreaking in its time, but Truffaut broke with traditional styles in order to communicate better, not to avoid communicating at all.All About Lily Chou-Chou follows two boys, Shūsuke Hoshino and Yūichi Hasumi, from the start of junior middle school when they first meet, and into the eighth grade. Shunji Iwai has gone to a great deal of trouble to obscure it. The film's teachers and adults care, but are hopelessly misinformed about what is really going on. Yuichi's life has been turned into hell by Hoshino, who seems to act not so much out of hatred as boredom. Shiori has sex with strangers for pay, but is too shy to tell Yuichi she likes him. These students drift without values or interests, devoting all the passion of their young lives to creatures who may exist only on the Internet. It will be appreciated by a handful of highly evolved film watchers who can generate a simultaneous analysis in their minds, but what is the point, really, in making a film that closes out most moviegoers? The world that swims murkily to the surface of "All About Lily Chou-Chou" is certainly a frightening one, eclipsing even the anomie of the Columbine killers. He has made a film that few reasonable ticket-buyers will have the patience to endure. Iwai seems to want to tell the story of his characters, and it could be a compelling one (some of the scenes have are poignant or wounding), but he cannot allow himself to make the film in a way that can communicate. It's a style that was interesting for a brief season and is now tiresome and pretentious.Įither you make an experimental film that cuts loose from narrative, characters and comprehensible cinematography, or you do not. Some sequences are so incomprehensible they play as complete abstractions. He and his cinematographer, Noboru Shinoda, are in love with their lightweight digital camera, and give us jerky hand-held out-of-focus shots. Shiori has a secret crush on Yuichi, but is under Hoshino's control and pathetically confides on the telephone, "Lately, when I think of men I think of customers." The elements are in place for a powerful story of alienated Japanese teenagers, but the writer-director, Shunji Iwai, cannot bring himself to make the story accessible to ordinary audiences. Hoshino has another sideline: He pimps Shiori ( Yu Aoi) to prostitute herself with businessmen, and makes her give him most of the money.
Both Yuichi and Yoko are the targets of cliques of school bullies.įor a while, Yuichi has a friend, Hoshino ( Shugo Oshinari), a fellow student who turns into a sadist and forces Yuichi to steal money and give it to him.
He has a crush on the real-life Yoko ( Ayumi Ito), a gifted pianist. Ironically, then, one of her songs consists of repetitions of "I see you and you see me." She is idolized by Yuichi ( Hayato Ichihara), a student in high school.
The story: Lily Chou-Chou is a Japanese pop idol, who must be real, since she appears in concert, but who we never see.
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