All About Lily Chou-Chou

Rating PG Formats DVD Genre drama Starring Hayato Ichihara, Shugo Oshinari, Ayimi Ito, Aymi Ito, Yu Aoi Directed by Shunji Iwai Publisher Home Vision Entertainment External Links Home Vision

Ask any thirteen year-old what they think and they'll tell you the same thing: "Life sucks."

All of us go through bad patches at one time or another but it does seem the one universally bad time is the age of 13. I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who went through this particular year and came out unscathed. Puberty running out of control like a Mack truck on ice, classroom bullies and the creeping feeling that whatever the rest of our life may be like, it won't be what we're hoping for. Life may not suck but 13 sure does.

Most coming of age films tend to place their characters around 13. Their makers seem to understand that even if the settings may be unfamiliar, most adults can still recall the feelings of that time. The hard part is making their film work for an audience of 13 year-olds.

Japanese director/writer Shunji Iwai may have stumbled onto the key to this demographic. His 2001 film, All About Lily Chou-Chou, hits these kids where they live: On the internet.

Several years ago, I watched my then five year-old niece get peevishly frustrated with her father because he couldn't figure out how to find something on the web. She finally pushed him away and, with a few deft keystrokes, found what they had both been looking for. It seems every generation looks for its own private language and my niece's generation had found theirs. Since then, she has been a committed communicator through the ether.

Iwai has made this same discovery. All About Lily Chou-Chou is the tale of Yuichi, a quiet, inward young boy who moonlights as the host of a chat room for singing star Lily Chou-Chou. Nothing, as he likes to tell visitors, is required to come into this room. You just have to love Lily. For Yuichi, this love is a complete one. It allows him to be the master of his domain, to keep the rules of communication firmly fixed on the area of his interest, and to be faceless. Unfortunately for him, he can do none of these when he is away from the computer.

Iwai originally developed the idea for this film by first creating a chat room then soliciting "chapters" for a novel from its readers. The idea took off and with it Iwai's imagination. All About Lily Chou-Chou is not an adaptation of this novel in any traditional sense of the term. It is more an adaptation of the kind of thinking that went into the responses. Through his chat room, Iwai came to see the obsessiveness, disillusionment, and isolation of a good percentage of Japan's young people.

Over the past ten years or so, coming of age films have gone through a metamorphosis. No longer facile depictions of a first sexual experience, the more intelligent ones have attempted to delve into this seemingly universal malaise. Movies like Gus van Sant's Elephant (2003) or Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale (2000) have uncovered the underlying violence that seems a sad motivator for so many disaffected young people. Iwai is treading this same territory but he is doing so in a way that deliberately eschews realism in favor of something more poetic. In terms of traditional storytelling, All About Lily Chou-Chou could be considered a mess. Episodic, filled with scenes which appear to lack a point, stylistically all over the map, it nonetheless succeeds by understanding the virtue behind this approach: This is the chaotic world as viewed through the eyes of a bright, deeply unhappy 13 year-old who cannot put any of this together into a coherent world view. Iwai doesn't show us Yuchi's world; he takes us into it. And, as anyone who has ever spent time around a 13 year-old will tell you, it's frightening place to be.

All About Lily Chou-Chou's central device, the chat room, is remarkably well-portrayed - remarkable because few things in the world are less cinematic than typing on a screen. Iwai opens the film with a battery of I. M.'s pounding across the screen while we see various scenes of Yuichi more or less at peace. This contrast sets up the inner energy versus the outward stasis of the character. It also disembodies all the "voices." The most disembodied will be Lily herself. Her music is frequently heard (Bjork, by way of Hong Kong superstar Faye Wang), her CD covers pop up in various locales, but we never actually get to meet her. Like so many pop stars, the real person is never so important as the image they project. Lily is precisely what Yuichi needs her to be: A totem on which to pin his own self-image.

Home Vision has released All About Lily Chou-Chou with a generally excellent 1:1.85 transfer of its heightened, digitally shot images and has also included an eery hour-long doc on the making of the film. The filmmaker for this particular tribute seems as obsessively connected to Lily and her creator as anyone in the final film. By halfway through I was starting to wonder if she saw the irony in her approach. Also included is an essay by the director which gives some interesting insights into the genesis of All About Lily Chou-Chou. Talk about obsessive.