All About Lily Chou Chou began its life as an interactive novel written by director Shunji Iwai (who also gave us Swallowtail and Butterfly, a film that heralded the arrival of a major new talent in Japanese cinema) and posted on the internet. Unfortunately, it probably worked better in the novel format than it does as a film.

As a film, Lily Chou Chou is a series of strikingly beautiful images that are consistently broken up by a lackluster and disjointed plot filled with the kind of philosophical profoundness that can only come from angst-filled teenagers. Since the pseudo intellectual pronouncements would never work as dialogue, Iwai presents them as kanji on the screen—the desperate ramblings of Lily Chou Chou fans in an internet chatroom. In the old days, they’d have probably just been really bad poetry—isn’t technology great?

It’s a coming of age story with a decidedly Japanese slant, but Iwai tries to dress it up into something more through the use of just about every art film trick in the book--a disjointed narrative throughline, long and ponderous shots, characters that are oblique and often inscrutable, and a penchant for divulging everything through exposition (in this case, the chat room transcripts that interrupt the film roughly once every ten minutes or so). Because of this, the film will be a tough sell for American audiences—most of who will be put off by the pace and the rather glib presentation.

The Lily Chou Chou of the title isn’t the central character, but rather a Japanese diva akin to Bjork or maybe Sade. Her music is ‘ethereal’ as she’s supposedly connected to some secret world the rest of us can’t quite see. That she was born at the exact moment that Mark Chapman killed John Lennon is either brilliant marketing by her handlers or a convenient and not-so-subtle hint that there really is something to her music.

Lily is the string that binds the film together. While we never see her on the screen (which was a wise choice since it would have probably shattered the illusion for most viewers), her spiritual manifesto is spouted by no less than a dozen or so mega fans in a Lily-holic chatroom. The room’s manager, a young male named Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) is perhaps the biggest Lily fan of all. Posting under the name philia, he uses the chatroom and Lily’s music to escape from his tragic Japanese existence. Yuichi is bullied by his peers, and eventually forced into a life of crime by the ringleader, Hoshino.

This bullying, which eventually leads to rape and murder, seems to be what the film is truly about. In a way not unlike Kinji Fukasaku’s controversial Battle Royale, Iwai presents the volatile and increasingly more violent Japanese youth culture for all to see. It’s not a pretty picture—witnessed by how casually a group of boys rape a classmate. While the picture the film paints is fascinating—and occasionally frightening--it’s not really enough to sustain the movie for its roughly two and a half hour running time.

In the film’s defense, it’s beautifully shot. Iwai still has a keen eye for dynamic visuals and some of the scene compositions are nearly poetic in their beauty. Shots of Yuichi standing alone in lush green rice fields while he listens to his Lily Chou Chou cds are breathtaking in their simplicity. Unfortunately, time and again these shots are cut from so that the viewer can watch yet another boring chatroom exchange on a black screen.

Ultimately, I wanted to love All About Lily Chou Chou. Shunji Iwai is a gifted filmmaker with a unique visual style, and that is the film’s one saving grace. It’s a shame that the brilliant visuals can’t make up for the overly melodramatic chatroom discussions or the hard to follow narrative. There’s a very good idea buried somewhere in this story, but Iwai never found a way to draw it out. That his main character is such a wimp certainly doesn’t help matters, either. If you’re really interested in Japanese cinema, then All About Lily Chou Chou is certainly worth a look. However, if you’re an impatient viewer who doesn’t have a lot of tolerance for ponderously paced foreign films, you’ll want to steer well clear of this one.


Recommended:
Yes