Youth Culture Film More Suited to the Page

By Justin Lowe
Special to AsianWeek

Among recent films depicting the supposed degeneration of Japanese youth (and there have been a spate of them), Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou has perhaps the most innovative origins. The director’s idea for the film began as a practical joke when he emailed a colleague an unfinished script that the producer encouraged Iwai to further develop. After several false starts and various revisions, Iwai transformed the Lily Chou-Chou project into a novel, which subsequently spawned an internet website and, eventually, the finished script for the film.

As a cultural experiment, All About Lily Chou-Chou has admirable post-modernist credentials, while as social commentary it unblinkingly examines some of the more sordid social issues confronting contemporary Japanese youth. Like the high-school hookers of Masato Harada’s Bounce, the juvenile delinquent schoolgirl in Akihiko Shiota’s Harmful Insect or the doomed teenagers of Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, the characters in Iwai’s film dramatize the often-brutal challenges teenagers face entering adult society in Japan. Ultimately, however, his project proves better suited to the page, whether print or electronic, than the screen.

In All About Lily Chou-Chou, the titular woman is not so much a character as a presence, a chanteuse whose music informs much of the narrative. When Yuichi, the only son of a remarried hairdresser, discovers Lily Chou-Chou’s music, he’s a relatively carefree thirteen-year-old entering junior high, eager to experience the world beyond his small elementary school and rural hometown.

His new best friend Hoshino, the maligned and misunderstood class president, introduces him to the mysterious singer, whose music traverses an ethereal plane somewhere between the styles of Enya and Bjork, frequently accompanied by images of destruction and decay. Yuichi becomes an ardent fan, establishing and hosting a website known as “Lilyphilia,” where he goes by the screen name “Philia” and the only rule is “you have to love Lily.” Chatroom messages between Philia and other Lily devotees appear onscreen throughout the film, underscoring plot developments and forming an oblique commentary on the action.

Driven mostly by boredom and the desire for a little spending money, Yuichi, Hoshino and their friends engage in petty crime, stealing from commuter train passengers, shoplifting CDs and fencing them to second-hand merchants. Yuichi is pretty much the runt of the bunch, constantly bullied and abused by the other kids, especially Hoshino.

In an abrupt flashback, Iwai shows how their wild behavior drifted out of control when Hoshino led the kids in ripping off a rich businessman, using the cash to pay for the group’s summer vacation in Okinawa. There on the southern island, Hoshino nearly drowns before being rescued by a peculiar drifter, who is later killed in a car accident. The combination of near-death and real death experiences seems to strip Hoshino of any youthful illusions, leaving him a hostile and calculating young teen.

After the boys begin their second year of junior high, Hoshino immediately establishes his superiority in the school hierarchy by beating and humiliating the class bully. He quickly rises from juvenile delinquent to youthful criminal, making porno videos of schoolgirl classmate Shiori and tricking her out to predatory salaryman “customers.”

Yuichi gets dragged along in the process when Hoshino assigns him to be Shiori’s minder, forcing the miserable kid to observe that his life might have been happier had it ended that previous summer. Events quickly degenerate from this point, with several key scenes of youthful violence and despair that leave Yuichi shaken and withdrawn.

Iwai presents these developments using shimmering, pristine, high-definition digital video that makes film stock appear almost superfluous. His Lily Chou-Chou song lyrics, with music by Takeshi Kobayashi performed by an uncredited singer, support his impressionistic approach, creating a suitably dreamlike backdrop for the story.

Yet even these impressive stylistic achievements do little to illuminate the details of the plot. Iwai’s unannounced shifts backwards and forwards in time, atmospheric scenes that contribute little to the storyline and frequent onscreen insertions of the online “Lilyphilia” discussion blur the lines between subjective and objective narrative. Character motivations and actions are obscure or inexplicable, rendering plot developments either forced or coincidental, but frequently unconvincing.

Iwai has so internalized his characters’ struggles — perhaps a writerly vestige of the story’s literary origins — that they’re not adequately dramatized onscreen. The youthful cast grapples admirably with the vague storyline over the film’s 146-minute running time in a valiant but ineffective attempt to actualize Iwai’s artistic vision, leaving viewers to draw their own conclusions about the outcome.

Although Iwai’s script material is faithfully drawn from the Japanese media’s shocking headline stories of teen violence and prostitution, his presentation is more atmospheric than narrative, robbing events of their potential audience impact. In the end we learn as little about Lily Chou-Chou as we do about her obsessive admirers.

All About Lily Chou-Chou, in Japanese with English subtitles, is unrated and opens November 8 in Bay Area theaters.

Reach Justin Lowe at nextwavve@yahoo.com.