All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001)

The problematic lives of teenager students for whom the singer Lily Chou-Chou's dreamy music is the only way to escape an alienating, violent and insensitive society.

Director:

Shunji Iwai

Writer:

Shunji Iwai

Stars:

Hayato Ichihara, Shûgo Oshinari, Ayumi Itô

4 wins & 1 nomination.

Cast

Credited cast:
Hayato Ichihara	...	Yûichi Hasumi
Shûgo Oshinari	...	Shusuke Hoshino
Ayumi Itô	...	Yôko Kuno
Takao Ohsawa	...	Tabito Takao
Miwako Ichikawa	...	Shimabukuro
Izumi Inamori	...	Izumi Hoshino
Yû Aoi	...	Shiori Tsuda
Kazusa Matsuda	...	Sumika Kanzaki
Ryô Katsuji	...	Hitoshi Terawaki
Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Chiyo Abe	...	Shizuko Hasumi
Takako Baba	...	School girl
Anri Ban	...	Noriko Izawa
Kaori Fujii	...	School nurse
Shinji Higuchi	...	Otaku
Takahito Hosoyamada	...	Kentarô Sasaki

Storyline

Life isn't easy for a group of high school kids growing up absurd in Japan's pervasive pop/cyber culture. As they negotiate teen badlands- school bullies, parents from another planet, lurid snapshots of sex and death- these everyday rebels without a cause seek sanctuary, even salvation, through pop star savior Lily Chou-Chou, embracing her sad, dreamy songs and sharing their fears and secrets in Lilyholic chat rooms. Immersed in the speed of everyday troubles, their lives inevitably climax in a fatal collision between real and virtual identities, a final logging-off from innocence.

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Plot Keywords:

bully | japan | prostitute | older man young girl relationship | summer vacation | 

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Taglines:

If you scream and no one hears you, she's there for you.

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Genres:

Crime | Drama | Music | Romance | Thriller

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Details

Official Sites:

Official site

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese Ryukyuan

Release Date:

6 October 2001 (Japan)

Also Known As:

All About Lily Chou-Chou

Box Office

Opening Weekend USA:

$3,064, 14 July 2002

Gross USA:

$26,485

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$38,082

Company Credits

Production Co:

Rockwell Eyes

Technical Specs

Runtime:

146 min 157 min (original cut)

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Color:

Color

Did You Know?

Trivia

At one point a character describes Hoshino's mom as looking like Izumi Inamori. This is the actress that plays Hoshino's mom.

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Quotes

Yûichi Hasumi: For me, only Lily is real.

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Connections

Referenced in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

User Reviews

Busy Breathing

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).