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All About Lily Chou-Chou
**
Cinema Releases - October 4, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. Japan.
146 minutes. Written and directed by Shunji Iwai. Starring Hayato Ichihara,
Shugo Oshinari, Ayumi Ito, Takao Osawa, Miwaki Ichikawa, Izumi Inamori, Yu
Aoi, Tomohiro Kako.
"All About Lily Chou-Chou" sprawls
about, following the lives of some unhappy Japanese teenagers over the course
of two or three years, showing them at school, on holiday, in houses of friends,
in shops and on street corners. Some of the kids know each other, some do
not. Occasionally, the screen will be filled with text and special effects,
as the movie cuts to the conversation on an internet chat room. Discussion
participants go on about how much they love the music of Lily Chou-Chou;
they say she is "part of the Ether" or "the Ether is her", and "her music
is not inspired by others; she gives birth to the music".
The film is about the unhappiness, the disorder,
the shabbiness of teenage life. About how nothing makes sense. About how
things can go wrong. About how, for some kids, music is a solace, and about
how music can be genuinely powerful, or can be just an empty
shield.
At least, I think that's what the movie is
about.
The first thing to make clear is that "All About
Lily Chou-Chou" is not about the singer at all. We don't hear much of her
music, as most of the soundtrack is taken up by the tenderly drifting notes
of Debussy. I knew nothing about Lily going into the film, and now, even
after seeing it and doing a search on the 'net, am still not sure if she
actually exists.
Characters in the movie are just as hard to figure
out. Many of the actors look similar, most of them go around mumbling words
through sunken heads, and all of them are seen through the mist of digital
video photography. I know that for a while we're following Hasumi (Hayato
Ichihara), a quiet kid who gets bullied at school and receives a vicious
reaction from his mother when he gets caught stealing a CD. I'm pretty sure
that later the focus shifts to Hoshino (Shugo Oshinari), a boy who starts
out meek but one day beats up the class tough guy and begins a transition
into cold, sadistic wretch. But I wasn't always sure which character I was
watching, or when and why their changes and developments were occurring,
or whether the film had shifted location, or who knew who, or
how.
It's pretty amazing how bad a job "All About Lily
Chou-Chou" does of establishing fundamentals, when in many ways it is skilfully
made. Behaviour in the film is performed by the actors with such naturalism
that sometimes it doesn't matter whether we know which characters are supposed
to be involved; we get caught up in conversations and events like eavesdroppers
or voyeurs. There are individual moments of raw power, mostly those involving
instances of bullying and manipulation. One sequence sees a boy get beaten
up before being forced to masturbate in a pile of garbage, while handheld
camera movements dash and circle in the dark, feeling the mess and wretchedness
and pain of the moment. There is another series of scenes where a boy pimps
out one of his 14-year old schoolmates. We see the girl walk home, gradually
finding herself less able to hide her depression, until she ends up crushing
her dirty money in the ground and fumbling around in a lake to clean away
her shame.
Certain moments walk a strange line between
instinctive force and narrative fuzziness. Late in the film there is a rape
scene at which I found myself wincing... at least, I think it was a rape
scene, and even so, I'm not sure who is being raped, who is attacking, whether
the scene this is intercut with is taking place outside or somewhere else
entirely, if another meeting we're told about actually occurs or not, or
who is responsible for arranging either.
"All About Lily Chou-Chou" has been praised by
a lot of people, but I'm reassured by the knowledge that nobody seems to
understand it. Robert Playfair, a colleague of mine at Sheffield Hallam
University, told me that he found the movie entrancing because, "It's like
a dream." Peter Bradshaw agrees, writing in the Guardian that we find
ourselves "knowing little and caring less about the elusive narrative...
you can find yourself drifting, as if suspended in warm water." Michael
Atkinson of the Village Voice admits that the film is "pretty stingy with
narrative cues... flashbacks are scant signified, jump cuts leave out massive
amounts of motivating incident". He then goes on to conclude that this is
"the loveliest film ever shot on high-def video".
These guys are pretty forgiving. I neither like
nor dislike "All About Lily Chou-Chou", but I am bothered by the fact that
the director, Shunji Iwai, never puts anything in his film that announces
it is supposed to feel like a dream. The flow is odd, but is it supposed
to be? My view is that the film's shots create interesting atmosphere, but
do an unintentionally lousy job of keeping up communication. Confusion is
one of my least favourite emotions, especially when I have to put up with
146 minutes of it. I dunno. Maybe it's something to do with the
Ether.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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