All About Lily Chou-Chou

“Despair is the red ether. Hope is the blue ether, the color of the earth. There is a single tear floating in the dark universe, and that is the earth.”

Directed by Produced by Written by Starring

Cinematography Edited by Distributed by Release date Running time Country Language

Shunji Iwai Koko Maeda Shunji Iwai Hayato Ichihara Shugo Oshinari Ayumi Ito Takao Osawa Miwako Ichikawa Izumi Inamori Yu Aoi Noboru Shinoda Yoshiharu Nakagami Rockwell Eyes October 6, 2001 146 min. Japan Japanese

PLOT

All About Lily Chou-Chou follows two boys, Shūsuke Hoshino and Yūichi Hasumi, from the start of junior middle school when they first meet, and into the eighth grade. The film has a discontinuous storyline, starting midway through the story, just after the second term of junior high school begins, then flashes back to the first term and summer vacation, and then skips back to the present.

In elementary school, Shusuke was one of the best students in school, but was picked on by his classmates. Shusuke and Yuichi meet and become friends when they join the kendo club, and Shusuke invites Yuichi to stay over at his house. Shusuke’s family is wealthy in comparison to Yuichi’s family. Yuichi mistakes Shusuke’s attractive young mother for his sister.

The kendo club summer camp training is tough, and Shusuke, Yuichi and some other first-grade boys decide to take a trip to Okinawa. Once there, Shusuke has a traumatic near-death experience and his personality changes from good-natured to dangerous and manipulative. Back at school in September for second term, he takes his place as class bully and shows his newfound power by ruining the lives of his classmates. An alternative voice, that of the character Sumika Kanzaki, attributes Shusuke’s personality change

Shugo Oshinari as Shūsuke Hoshino Hayato Ichihara as Yūichi Hasumi Ayumi Ito as Yōko Kuno Yū Aoi as Shiori Tsuda Yuki Ito as Kamino Izumi Inamori as Izumi Hoshino Salyu as Lily Chou-Chou

You can love it or hate it, but you definitely won’t forget it. Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou mystified some audiences and became an inedible touchstone for others. Prostitution by blackmail and vicious bullying punctuate a story about a bunch of alienated teens stifled by the rigor of school and familial expectations. The title references one of the film’s characters, an elusive popstar who is the fixation of the protagonist, Hasumi.

Tense and claustrophobic, this film captures the post-Y2K generation, who have just figured out the world is not ending and they’ve got a whole life left to live. Throughout the film, you see teens with their heads in books, music flowing from their headphones and their eyes glued to screens. Anything to distract from life and subtract the time left. But these distractions are just temporary fixes, because as soon as they lift their heads, Iwai pushes them back into the frenzy of ‘real life’.