All about Lily Chou Chou

Director: Shunji Iwai
Cast:Lchihara Hayato 
Oshinari Syuugo 
Ho Itoo 
Aoi Yuu 

When I was in high school, I saw a number of fine films, but the one that has stuck in my mind the most, indeed haunted me at that time, was Shunji Iwai’s All about Lily Chou-Chou.

All About Lily Chou-Chou a teenager film set in Japan. But it’s not much like any other teen film that I have ever seen. It’s a history of pain and humiliation: bullying among 13 and 14 year old boys and girls moving from various forms of petty theft, enforced prostitution, rape, and murder. And all this is shown primarily from the point of view of the victims, though the film also bears witness to the startling rapidity with which friendships can shift, so that a victim suddenly becomes a torturer.

The film is leisurely and contemplative, even when it presents scenes of painful brutality. The movie takes its time to reach its goals; it even seems to be drifting randomly at times, only to lead up to scenes that knit everything together with extraordinary force and concision.

The conjunction of sound and image is of course a big part of what makes the film so powerful. Because of this, the events that the film narrates are secondary to the feelings that those events evoke; through evocative music and fragmented images, Iwai tracks the minutest shifts of affect in the lives of the characters.

Many individual scenes from All about Lily Chou-Chou stick in my mind so far. And they remind me about my youth memory. I think I should watch it again this weekend.