All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001)

For American young people, the junior high years are the most confusing and traumatic years of their lives. All About Lily Chou-Chou demonstrates that this can be said for modern Japanese young people as well. Made in 2001, Shunji Iwai’s depiction of this age group had become more sympathetic yet also more fragmentary and violent than in earlier movies about the same age, such as Typhoon Club during the eighties or Love is in the Green Wind  during the sixties.

Lily Chou-Chou is not one of the teens but rather a singer with a peculiar type of pop that the kids say expresses “the ether.” She is not a major pop star, for most of the school kids think her music is weird, but her songs speak to a small dedicated handful. One of her biggest fans is 14-year-old Yuichi, who has set up a chat room on line to talk about her and her music. He is humiliated when a school bully and his gang set upon him, break his CD, and force him to masturbate in front of them. Then we abruptly move back to his entrance into middle school at age 13 where he accidentally becomes friends with Hoshino, who is himself bullied because he is selected by the teachers as the best student, when they both join the same kendo class. Before long there are five boys hanging around together. After Hoshino impulsively steals money from another gang that has mugged a rich guy in a parking lot, the five have a golden summer trip to Okinawa with a private tour company. There they first see death up close as a wanderer who drops in and out of their camp is hit by a truck.

When they return in the autumn, Hoshino defeats the class bully but soon takes his place so the five friends become a gang, until Hoshino turns on Yuichi as we saw in the first scene near the end of Yuichi’s fourteenth year. Before that, Hoshino has somehow managed to blackmail Tsuda into Ko Gal prostitution, forcing Yuichi to go with her back and forth to the larger town and act as her pimp/protector. Another girl, Kuno, is a talented pianist, which makes her a target for the “mean girl” bullies, and they arrange for her to be attacked by Hoshino’s boys, who carry it too far and actually rape her. She shaves her head so that Hoshino can not force her to follow in Tsuda’s footsteps. Since Yuichi had actually guided Kuno into the trap, not knowing what would happen later, he can’t ever speak to her, much less express the love he has felt since he first saw her.

The irony is that all four of these are members of Yuichi’s chat room, along with many others across the country, but since they all use aliases, no one knows this but the viewers who work it out from their postings interspersed with the actions on screen. On the chat room, with Lily as their ostensible subject, they can express personal feelings that they can never bring themselves to express to each other. Sometime following Yuichi’s humiliation seen in the opening scenes, emotions come to a dramatic and violent head when Lily appears for a live concert in a nearby city, where Hoshino destroys Yuichi’s ticket, not knowing that Yuichi is his on-line best friend.

Hoshino has always been something of an outsider in his elementary years. His mother is so happy to see Yuichi come home with him from kendo class that it suggests he has rarely brought home any friends before. During the trip to Okinawa he had nearly drowned but one of the mean girls blames the change in his personality on his parents’ divorce, which we do not see, either of which events could have been the trigger for his change in personality.

Yuichi’s mother appears to be kind and loving, but his home life is only sketched for the viewer. She runs a hair salon, which suggests Yuichi is poorer than the other principals; she is also pregnant, and some of the comments of the man of the house suggest he is not the father of either Yuichi or his younger brother Shinichi.* As often happens with kids of the age shown here, the parents have little or no knowledge of the lives their children lead but this unawareness seems to be even more obvious than usual. Tsuda, Kuno, and Hoshino live in very nice houses, but their parents seem to take no interest in what they do away from the house. When Yuichi is caught shoplifting one of Lily’s albums, he calls his teacher, not his mother, just as the kids trapped in Typhoon Club turn to their teacher rather than to any of their parents. But even that kind and caring young teacher has no idea what is going on in the classroom when she is not there, and as we have seen in many other movies about Japanese schools, she seems not to be there quite a lot.

Nor does anyone in Okinawa seem to be much surprised when five 13-year-old boys turn up unchaperoned for the vacation tour, conducted by three women in their twenties and a driver who does not speak Japanese. Though the boys tend to focus their own movie cameras on parts of the women’s bodies, there is no hint that the young women are any more than tour guides who want to make the stay educational and pleasant, with river trips, food, fireworks, and local music.

We don’t quite know where the movie takes place. Many scenes are in the rice fields, lush green in growing season, dark and barren in the winter. The homes we see suggest commuter parents, not local village farmers, and Tsuda takes the train into a larger city for her assignations, but Lily’s concert is not in Tokyo.

The exteriors of homes we see are quite prosperous in appearance and cell phones and computers abound, so we are not dealing with juvenile delinquent gangs driven by poverty.

Like Iwai’s earlier Yentown, the movie is 2½ hours long and shot with hand-held camera much of the time. It was one of the earliest movies to use the new CineAlta digital system, which means many of the scenes look like film, unlike the earlier digital Tokyo Trash Baby, and allows even more freedom of movement and use of natural lighting for the camera than in Iwai’s earlier feature. As in 20^th Century Nostalgia, many of the kids have video cameras of their own and many scenes, especially in Okinawa, look like Iwai used those lower resolution tapes. Most startling, however, is the music. Someone on the chatroom had said that the only truly ethereal music was made by Lily and by Debussy, and the piano music of Debussy is the main component of the soundtrack. Takeshi Kobayashi produced Lily’s music, sung here by the previously unknown singer Salyu, seen only in a brief clip from a music video, who rarely recorded in later years and was known more for the exotic nature of her voice than for pop success. None of this impressionistic and quiet soundscape should work in a movie that shows such humiliating and brutal scenes among the kids, yet it does, underlining the isolation that all of the principals feel from the rest of society.

Most of the kids are in their first or second movie and all seem absolutely natural. The rape and Tsuda’s assignations occur off-screen, so we have no exploitative nudity, and Yuichi’s masturbation scene is shot at night and in long shot. While Iwai seems utterly sympathetic to the kids themselves and is reported to have drawn many of the ideas from a chat room he set up while developing the script, it nevertheless seems to reflect the unease Japanese society as a whole was feeling at the time about materialism, teenage culture, the influence of pop music, and of course the new internet. In many ways, it is one of the most disturbing depictions from any nation of young lives destroyed by their own confusions and inability to express themselves to others.

The imagery, the use of Debussy, and the elliptical story-telling make it a haunting experience, other-worldly yet painfully realistic.

* Among many other things, “ichi” can be used to indicate the first son, so the man says there can’t be two “ichis” in the same family.