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All About Lily Chou-Chou
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Wikipedia article
is a 2001 Japanese film, written and directed by Shunji Iwai, that portrays the lives of 14-year-old students in Japan and the effect the enigmatic singer Lily Chou-Chou's music has on some of them.
The film is noted for an unconventional visual style which includes many jump cuts and shots with disjunctive contents, as well as for an elliptical narrative. These features, which have led the film to be described as restless or "explosive", are viewed by critics as efforts to artistically evoke the emotional lives of disaffected Japanese youth.
Critics mostly expressed positive views on 'All About Lily Chou-Chou'. While some found the story's ambiguity frustrating, the film's lyricism drew praise.
Plot
'All About Lily Chou-Chou' follows two boys, Shsuke Hoshino and Yichi Hasumi, from the start of junior middle school when they first meet, and into the eighth grade. 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.
In elementary school, Shusuke was one of the best students in school, but was picked on by his classmates. Shusuke and Yuichi meet and become friends when they join the kendo club, and Shusuke invites Yuichi to stay over at his house. Shusuke's family is wealthy in comparison to Yuichi's family. Yuichi mistakes Shusuke's attractive young mother for his sister.
The kendo club summer camp training is tough, and Shusuke, Yuichi and some other first-grade boys decide to take a trip to Okinawa. Once there, Shusuke has a traumatic near-death experience and his personality changes from good-natured to dangerous and manipulative. Back at school in September for second term, he takes his place as class bully and shows his newfound power by ruining the lives of his classmates. An alternative voice, that of the character Sumika Kanzaki, attributes Shusuke's personality change to the collapse of his family's business and his parents' divorce; this matches several scenes connecting the decline of Shusuke who has had to change his name to divorce.
Yuichi, the confused and shy former friend of Shusuke, finds himself sucked into his now-tormentor's gang. He is ridiculed and coerced into doing Shusuke's dirty work, and finds solace only in the ethereal music Lily Chou-Chou makes, and acting as web editor for his fan website. Things become far worse for everyone when Yuichi is assigned to supervising Shiori Tsuda, whom Shusuke has blackmailed into enjo ksai, and another girl is raped by Shusuke's lackeys after unwittingly offending the school's girl gang. The whole quagmire comes to a head when Yuichi heads to Tokyo to see a Lily Chou-Chou concert.
The story of Shusuke and Yuichi is paralleled by messages posted to a Lily Chou-Chou message board which are displayed on screen. Until the meeting at the concert, it is left up to the viewer to figure out which characters in the story are posting under what names.
Production
On April 1, 2000, Shunji Iwai went live with his internet novel, in the form of a website called 'Lilyholic', where he posted messages as several characters on the BBS. Readers of the novel were free to post alongside Iwai's characters and interact with each other, indeed this BBS is where some of the content from the movie comes from. After the main incident in the novel took place, posting was closed and the second phase of the novel started, about the lives of 14-year-olds. (The novel is available on CD-ROM, but only in Japanese.)
Production on the film began in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture on August 13, 2000, and ended on November 28, 2000. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 2001, and opened in Japan on October 6, 2001.
Iwai was the first Japanese director to use the, at the time, completely new digital video camera, the Sony HDW-F900 to shoot the film.
It is thought that Iwai was inspired to shoot in digital by his friend, the anime and live-action film director Hideaki Anno, who shot his own digital film entitled 'Love & Pop', in 1998. Anno later cast Iwai as the lead in his second live-action film, 'Shiki-Jitsu'. After the film's release a synopsis written from the point of view of the main character Yichi was published online to explain the film's events.
Music
The soundtrack of 'Lily Chou-Chou' was written and arranged by Takeshi Kobayashi, with vocals by the singer Salyu. It features a number of songs that are sung by the fictional rock star Lily Chou-Chou in the film. The soundtrack also makes heavy use of the classical music of Claude Debussy.
In 2010 Salyu and Takeshi Kobayashi released a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTlH-4tt9Vo|new song] under the YouTube name 'LilyChouChou2000', suggesting that the Lily Chou-Chou moniker was still alive.
Cast
*Shugo Oshinari as 'Shsuke Hoshino' ( 'Hoshino Shsuke'), the best student in school who, after a trip to Okinawa, becomes a bully. Posts under the alias Blue Cat ( 'Ao Neko').
*Hayato Ichihara as 'Yichi Hasumi' ( 'Hasumi Yichi'), Shusuke's former friend who becomes a reluctant member of his gang and will later on be bullied by Shusuke. Yichi is the leading character in the movie. He admins an online Lily Chou-Chou BBS under the alias Philia ( 'Firia') and is a great fan of the singer.
*Ayumi Ito as 'Yko Kuno' ( 'Kuno Yko'), a classmate of Yichi's. A brilliant pianist, she is the envy of a clique of powerful girls, and therefore is also bullied. She is raped by Shusuke's gang and cuts off her hair as a way of avoiding Shiori Tsuda's fate.
*Y Aoi as 'Shiori Tsuda' ( 'Tsuda Shiori'), a classmate of Yichi who gets blackmailed into enjo ksai by Shusuke. Yichi befriends her later on, and introduces her to Lily's music. Near the end of the movie she takes her life.
*Yuki Ito as 'Kamino', one of the boys in the blue school uniforms at the train station when Yoko is introduced.
*Izumi Inamori as 'Izumi Hoshino' ( 'Hoshino Izumi'), Shusuke's mother. It is unknown if she is single. She loves her son very much and welcomes Yichi with open arms during a junior high sleepover at the Hoshino household. A classmate of Yichi suggests that this is done to ensure that Yichi will enjoy being Hoshino's friend.
*Salyu as 'Lily Chou-Chou', the enigmatic and ethereal singer that Yichi, Tsuda and others in the film are fans of. She is hardly seen in the film, except on a video screen near the story's end, but her music is heard throughout the movie. She is said by her fans to channel what is called "the Ether", which is not unlike the invisible substance once thought by ancient philosophers to be the field that light travels through. This "ether" can be heard in the calm, melancholy songs she sings.
*Takao Osawa as Takao Tabito
*Miwako Ichikawa as Shimabukuro
Details
*Quentin Tarantino used the song "Kaifuku Suru Kizu (Wounds that heal)" from the 'Lily Chou-Chou' soundtrack in 'Kill Bill', in the scene where the Bride views Hattori Hanz's sword collection.
*The idea of Lily Chou-Chou the rock star was inspired by Faye Wong.
*Extras at the concert scene were given an index card with extremely detailed information as to the thought process they should be going through during filming. There were hundreds of extras, partly made up of fans of the internet novel who had BBS meet ups during the day. Posters from the BBS are visible in the background of this scene and can be spotted by watching for clues from their posts.
*Ayumi Ito spent weeks training on the piano in order to do all of her scenes without a double. She became so obsessed with Debussy's "Arabesque No. 1" that she made it her cell phone ringtone.
*Originally, in the internet novel, Yichi and Hoshino belong to the track team, not the kendo team.
*Debussy wrote his famous Children's Corner Suite (1909) for his beloved daughter whom he nicknamed Chouchou.
*The movie's original runtime was 157 minutes, but the original print of the 157 minute version no longer exists because it was burned. The extra 11 minutes was composed of extra and intense footage of the rape scene, a scene with Yichi on the beach (similar to Hoshino's drowning scene) and an extended funeral scene.
Style
Comparing it to 'The 400 Blows' (1959), Andrew O'Hehir dubbed 'All About Lily Chou-Chou' "sprawling and adventurous [...] [Iwai's] movie has a youthful restlessness, an almost compulsive daring". According to 'Entertainment Weekly'
According to Scott Tobias of 'The A.V. Club', Iwai aimed to capture the feeling of being a teenager; the writer claimed that it "mimics the aimless, unformed rhythms of adolescent life" by "[d]rifting through time and space without firmly situating the viewer". Michael Atkinson of 'The Village Voice' noted, "Flashbacks are scant signified, and jump cuts leave out massive amounts of motivating incident [...] Iwai prefers to observe from a distance, and he has a taste for disjunctive visuals".
Interpretation
O'Hehir placed the film within the "cinema of globalization" and said that Iwai makes "the oldest possible complaint about modern culture: that as it purports to bring people together it actually keeps them separate". Lily herself never appears in the film, and O'Hehir interpreted her as a symbol for a tranquility that has disappeared from the rapidly changing Japan of the film's universe. While Thomas agreed that the film supports the idea that traditional social structures prevent the rise of disaffected youth, he also wrote that the teens' brutality and allegiance to a sadistic leader strongly resembled the militarism of Japan during World War II.
Atkinson argues that 'All About Lily Chou-Chou' "[mourns] the despoiling tragedies of pre-adulthood and the infuriating inadequacy of nostalgia." Tobias said the film ultimately laments how all the teens are bottling up anger.
Reception
The film has a 69% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes (based on 39 reviews), and a 73/100 average on Metacritic (based on 18 reviews). Atkinson referred to 'All About Lily Chou-Chou' as "possibly the loveliest film ever shot on high-def video." He argued that the work overly lacks narrative cues, but still wrote that "Iwai fashions pensive cyber-lyricism out of a new generations instruments of introversion". O'Hehir praised "its wealth of ideas, its willingness to go anywhere and do anything [...] [Iwai's] lustrous images and the complexity of his portrayal of middle-class Japan in decline". He described it as a "puzzling, intermittently brilliant film".
In 'The A.V. Club', Scott Tobias wrote, "Iwai's arty self-consciousness takes some getting used to, but as the film slides inexorably toward a devastating third act, it seems to tighten its grasp on the sad, painful remove that governs its young characters' lives." Kevin Thomas wrote a moderately positive review in 'Los Angeles Times', calling the work "maddeningly hard to follow" but also "profoundly disturbing [...] Iwais depiction of what life can be like for far too many teens comes across loud and clear."
Roger Ebert gave the film two stars, dismissing the visual style as "tiresome and pretentious". On the narrative he wrote, "The elements are in place for a powerful story of alienated Japanese teenagers, but [Iwai] cannot bring himself to make the story accessible to ordinary audiences. [...] Some sequences are so incomprehensible they play as complete abstractions." Regarding the comparisons to 'The 400 Blows', Ebert argued, "Truffaut broke with traditional styles in order to communicate better, not to avoid communicating at all." In 2020, James Marsh of 'South China Morning Post' listed the film as one of the 25 best Japanese films since 2000.
Awards and nominations
*2002 Berlin International Film Festival Panorama (Shunji Iwai)
*2002 6th Shanghai International Film Festival Best Music (Takeshi Kobayashi) and Special Jury Award (Shunji Iwai)
Box office totals
*'Budget': 150,000,000 (US$1,249,656)
Local:
*'Japan': 3,026,188,000 (US$25,211,298)
*'Opening Week Gross': 514,775,000 (US$4,288,612)
*'Date Released': October 6, 2001
*'In release': 15.7 weeks
International:
*'USA': US$26,485 (3,179,328)
Rentals:
*'Japan': 810,340,000 (US$6,750,436)
References
Buy All About Lily Chou-Chou now from Amazon
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