He blackmails a sweet girl, Shiori Tsuda (Yu Aoi), into a dire fate as a street prostitute. So shaken is Hoshino by his brush with death and his family’s sudden loss of its textile mill that he has become a vicious marauder who terrorizes his school mates. Then Hoshino nearly drowns.īack home is soon hell on Earth for Yuichi and others. In the distance is an island said to be especially beautiful, and Yuichi identifies it with a paradise Lily sings about in a song.īut the boys encounter a naturalist who cheerfully tells them that his observations of the flora and fauna of the islands suggest that the region is a hell on Earth, where a tree that strangles other trees thrives. The islands off Okinawa are beautiful, primitive, exotic, sensual and dangerous. A rich kid, Hoshino, has taken up kendo, a Japanese sport of swordplay, at school and manages to transform himself from “class wimp to class president.”īesides Yuichi, Hoshino has attracted other friends, and they take a vacation to Okinawa, at which point Shinoda switches to a restless, jabbing, hand-held camera style of shooting for a deliberately unsettling effect. It is he who introduces Yuichi to Lily’s music, but its seductive promise surely seems a sham to him ultimately. We are shocked to discover that the gang’s leader, Hoshino (Shugo Oshinari) has reached out to Yuichi for friendship because Hoshino has been subjected to widespread ridicule for being an outstanding student. Then we’re subjected to an abrupt cut to what has got to be a flashback. This makes the gang sure he has ratted on them, and they subject him to a beating so vicious and humiliating that we can only be grateful that it is so discreetly presented. One day, however, model good kid that he is, Yuichi is caught swiping a Lily CD. When he’s not listening to her or doing his homework, he is on the Internet, where he’s set up a Lily-philia Web site and is comforted by connecting via constant e-mail with other admirers of her music. Yuichi, whose mother is a hairdresser and whose home is small but well-furnished, has pretty much withdrawn into the world of Lily’s shimmering, reassuring, ethereal music. We discover that all of this is taking place in a spacious, attractive city somewhere in Japan, where the gangbangers and Yuichi attend a very large junior high, a model of sleek, functional architectural design. We then see a gang of teens, aboard a train, steal a dozing businessman’s briefcase and later, looting boxfuls of CDs from a music store. Iwai’s go-for-broke cinematographer Noboru Shinoda’s first shot is of Yuichi Hasumi (Hayato Ichihara, in a remarkable highly internalized characterization), a slim, handsome boy standing in a rice field holding his CD player and listening to Lily Chou-Chou, a Bjork-like singer who has captivated him and countless other Japanese teens.
But those who do will have felt just how all-important music can be to unhappy and endangered teenagers and how savagery can sweep over young people, even in the most seemingly stable and prosperous communities. Not everyone will be willing to go the 146-minute distance of a film that can be maddeningly hard to follow and uncompromisingly bleak. It is also a daunting, demanding experience, one whose complex structure makes it a challenge to track despite literate subtitles. Shunji Iwai’s “All About Lily Chou-Chou” is bravura, ambitious and profoundly disturbing.
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