All About Lily Chou Chou

A+

Directed by Shunji Iwai

Shunji Iwai's horrowing tale of adolescence is a shocking, beautiful, and ultimately believable rumination on isolation, loneliness, and escapism in a digital world.

Yuichi is a 14 year old boy navigating the choppy waters of adolescence with the help of ethereal singer Lily Chou Chou who he spends his time obsessing over with a linkminded band of "Lilyholics" on an internet chatroom. Lily Chou Chou provides Yuichi a measure of escape from his truly hellish school situation where bullying runs rampant, led by the morally bankrupt Hoshino who terrorizes his fellow schoolmates and even runs blackmails some of his female classmates into a forming a prostitution ring. As events at school escalate, Yuichi finds it ever more difficult to keep the gloom of his everyday life from infringing on his sole window of escape, Lily Chou Chou.

"Lily Chou Chou" is unquestionably bleak stuff and gives few glimpses of hope in the otherwise gloomy world that Yuichi and his classmates are trapped in. At the same time, it's a mesmorizing and almost ravisingly beautiful film, Iwai's beautiful visual touches being complemented perfectly by a melancholy score by Takeshi Kobayashi that makes heavy use of Debussy. The gloominess of the script, however, is tempered by Iwai's obvious compassion for his characters and their struggles and his implication that better days are ahead for Yuichi and his friends, no matter how ugly things are at the moment.
Iwai isn't Larry Clarke, meaning he isn't some old hack who thinks high school is a land of rampant drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, and generally misanthropy even though he portrays it that way in "Lily Chou Chou." Many of Iwai's other films that deal with high school aged characters (which make up the bulk of his work) seem to show a range of views on adolescence, such as the saccharine sweet "April Story" or the nostlagic and melancholy "Hana and Alice" both of which treat adolescence as a kinder and decidly gentler time than "Lily Chou Chou." My impression is that Iwai recognizes the pain and the joys of adolescences and simply maximizes them in his work in an effort to present a portrayal of youth that, although being realistic to some degree, pushes the envelope and dips into the surreal as well. I still remember high school and I can say that it often seemed like it was both the best and worst of times, a feeling that Iwai connects well with. I've always appreciated Iwai's ability to tinge his optimistic and bright films with a hint of melancholy and his more gloomy and dark pictures with moments of hope, an ability that gives all of his films greater depth.
This is Shunji Iwai's masterpiece, a wonderful, poignant, and beautiful film that demands repeat viewings.