All About Lily Chou-Chou

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
2001

All About Lily Chou-Chou
Shunji Iwai
JAPAN, 2001
146 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Rockwell Eyes Inc.
Producer: Koko Maeda
Screenplay: Shunji Iwai
Cinematographer: Noboru Shinoda
Editor: Yoshiharu Nakagami
Production Designer: Noboru Ishida
Sound: Osamu Takizawa
Music: Takeshi Kobayashi
Principal Cast: Hayato Ichihara, Shugo Oshinari, Aymi Ito Print Source/Foreign Sales Agent: Fortissimo Film Production: Rockwell Eyes Inc.

Shunji Iwai, best known for for his pitch-perfect low-key romantic films Love Letter and April Story has created something entirely fresh. All About Lily Chou-Chou is one of the most challenging, complex and brilliant cinematic experiences of the year.

As the movie begins, expansive and moody images feed an elliptical narrative, interrupted by frenetic typing on a black screen. The writers are devotees of Lily, a popular musician. We are on their broadband site called Lilyholic, and much of their discussion is focussed on the “ether,” a term Lily uses to speak about the effect of music on a listener. They also discuss a terrible incident in Shibuya a few years back when the stabbing of a teenaged boy coincided with the disappearance of another fan site, Lily Philia.

Gradually we learn that the images we are seeing relay the story of this site’s destruction and how the murder came to pass. But the film’s lead characters are very different from the enthusiastic and articulate fans on the site; they are high school students, bitter and taciturn, and they act on any possible opportunity to torture one another, both psychologically and physically. Their personal histories are revealed and it becomes clear how the pressures of student life transformed them into monsters. But very little is explained in the end; we are left with an overwhelming sadness in the face of complete humiliation and isolation.

Described as such, All About Lily Chou-Chou sounds like a close relative to the other powerful, nihilistic films this year about the state of Japanese youth—Blue Spring, Harmful Insect and Battle Royale. Though this film definitely has much in common with these others, the themes that Iwai is concerned with are actually much more disturbing. The Internet acts here as a kind of last beacon for human exchange and kindness. The creation of idols, a particularly intense and fraught process in Japan, is the seed of societal destruction. And finally, the undefinable power of music remains the only salvation for those left alienated by an uncaring world. All About Lily Chou-Chou is an intensely moving experience.
—Noah Cowan