ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU

6/10

Riri Shushu no subete : Japan 2001 : Shunji Iwai : 146mins

Hallucinatory teen epic… baffling, beautiful and beguiling in equal measure… not to mention boring… more than 2 ¾ hours of dreamy episodes over a three-year-period in the lives of some Japanese high-schoolers… most are fans of (fictional) pop icon Lily Chou-Chou, whose bland but atmospheric pop is like Bjork on prozac… Lily is never ‘seen’ on screen: film climaxes with fans attending a massive concert, but number-one fan Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) is tricked out of his ticket by school bully Hoshino (Oshinari) so must watch on giant monitor screens outside… distinct shades of the ‘live’ concert by Simone in S1m0ne … and is ‘Lily’ any more real than Pacino’s pixellated progeny?… for over a decade, many Japanese pop icons have been computer-generated figures known as idoru – see novel of same title by William Gibson… to the fans, Lily is a vivid presence in their lives, whether or not she is literally ‘real’… according to their internet chat-room conversations (snatches of which Iwai regularly flashes up on screen, she taps into ‘the Ether’ – a vague concept somewhere between cyberspace, karma and Gaia (after a killing, a chat-roomer complains ‘someone has polluted the ether’) … All About Lily Chou-Chou also exists in its own kind of ether … the atmospheres of external and internal spaces… high-def DV cameras produce mildly heightened colours: recurring shots of Yuichi standing in a vast green rice-field, white shirted, CD Walkman on, eyes closed, swaying to Lily’s latest tracks … ecstatic images accompany the long end credits of the other Lily fans standing in similar fields at dusk (“it’s always sunset” sings Lily) … alone together … many such instances of Iwai’s remarkable ‘eye’ … even home-movie interlude in distant Okinawa, harsher colours, rougher video, wobbly hand-held – even this looks stunning … tuned in to surroundings, like Malick in The Thin Red Line … similar length, but this is no war chronicle … lack of incident for long, patience-testing stretches … bullied Yoko (Ayumi Ito) plays Debussy, which recurs on the soundtrack … long sequences of her at the piano … low-level high-school intrigues, rivalries, jealousies … from scene to scene, effect veers between hypnotic and soporific … we drift in and out of this Ether … haunted, lost in this ‘Abyss of Loneliness’ … Iwai’s talents are clear: there’s a truly great film here, somewhere among all this footage … half the length would be twice as strong … as with Lily Chou-Chou herself: arguable whether the film really ‘exists’ at all … remarkable stuff, but not exactly recommendable to anyone not interested in modern Japanese teen culture and / or experimental, innovative, taxing cinema.

13th November, 2002
(seen 12th, Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle)

by Neil Young

-