World of Grey: All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001)

Jenna Ng

Very recently, a British tabloid broke the story that a 13‑year-old boy has fathered a child with his 15-year-old girlfriend. The scandal grows with each tawdry detail – the youth of the parents, the lack of parental supervision, the spectacle of the media feeding frenzy. Yet, underlying the shock is also a bafflement of the chasm between the tut-tutting adults and these children‑parents: that we, each of us once a child, no longer understand children and what they are thinking or doing.

This bafflement at today’s teenagers is perhaps most prominent in Japan, where the extremism of its youth violence and kireru – sudden fits of rage – bewilder a society which prides itself on its conformism and stability, a society so polite that, as in a scene from All About Lily Chou-Chou (Riri shushu no subete), a teacher apologises profusely to his student’s pregnant mother for asking her to come to school to see about her misbehaving son. Japan ’s films correspondingly reflect its wayward youth, sometimes to the extent of surreal horror: in Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale (2000), a class of schoolchildren are despatched into a jungle to literally hunt out and kill each other because, as their teacher explains, they are so out of control that Darwinian annihilation is the only way to contain them.

Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou portrays violent, wayward, alienated teenagers who seek solace in a virtual world where they swear devotion to singer‑musician Lily, yet in their real lives conduct and are subject to acts of alarming cruelty: Hoshino (Shugo Oshinari) forces his friend, Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara), to perform humiliating acts; the boys trick a girl classmate into a warehouse and rape her; they steal, rob and bully; the girls ostracise a classmate and order violence on her; another girl is blackmailed into prostitution. Teenage violence runs as an express subject in Lily, too explicit for irony – a news program early in the film features the headline ‘Youth Hijacks Expressway Bus’, and it becomes a topic of conversation: the Lilyphilia discussants speculate whether the police have caught the perpetrator; Yuichi’s step-father opines that ‘they should hang him’. A customer in Yuichi’s mother’s hair salon deplores: ‘Kids these days are very scary’.

We might watch all this in the same bafflement as with the tabloid story: how to explain such behaviour, such cruelty from one so young? What is interesting, however, is that the film not only does not proffer to give answers but, intentionally or otherwise, feeds into our bafflement, in two ways. Firstly, the world in Lily is presented as one in which not only are its teenagers behaving as such, but its adults are also, at best, powerless, ignorant and, at worst, in complicity. Witnessing the ostracising of the class pianist, the teacher capitulates to the persecution by entreating the bullies to perform and promising that the pianist will play no part. A female teacher’s only response to the assaulted Kuno (Ayumi Ito), now also shaven, is to offer her a wig. Yuichi’s mother, helplessly hitting her son for stealing, later blithely dyes his hair, heedless of his troubles even as she rushes to attend to her wailing newborn. Our bafflement extends to the adults of the film: how to explain such almost caricatured obliviousness from these adults who should be guiding the young?

Secondly, the film augments our bewilderment by presenting its own deliberately challenging forms: its non‑linear narrative is, at least on first viewing, not easy to follow, with unmarked time leaps and unsatisfactory narrative gaps (why did Hoshino suddenly turn so evil – just because he nearly drowned?), and its formalist aesthetics can be distracting – the green glow of the night shots, the superimposed typed text, the stabbings of ‘Reload’ computer refresh, the abruptly inserted holiday footage from Yuichi’s handheld camera, the uncertain focusing so that images soften and sharpen like lunar waxing and waning, the film itself now alternating between personal memory, home video, computer screen, indexical record, re‑writable palimpsest.

In the interstices of these fluxes, All About Lily Chou-Chou transforms into a mood piece, self-consciously eschewing account and explanation, less concerned with analysing our bafflement than it is with simply our bafflement itself, as if with the detached curiosity of an observing alien. One sequence sums up how the film turns this mode of reflexivity on us: Yuichi is shown in side-profile, staring at something through a shop window; the next shot cuts to a close‑up of his face, awash with longing. He is given what he covets; the following shot shows him wheeling his bicycle with a large, flat object strapped against it. We finally see it: a life‑size poster of Erotic, one of Lily’s albums. Later, in a rare stationary shot lasting almost a minute, Yuichi wordlessly admires the poster, propped against a post, as if savouring a delicacy, now pacing around it, now squatting to one side, now pondering it from another angle. The poster is placed squarely in the foreground and middle of the shot – it is there for our enjoyment, too. Yet the fact is there is nothing for us to admire about the poster; so early in the film, we may not even know what Erotic is. The point of the shot, notwithstanding the prominent placing of the poster, is not to admire the poster, but to admire Yuichi admiring the poster. Questions – what is this poster about? What is Erotic? – fall away, so needless are they in the sheer mood of the film: the colours, the music, the softness, the intensity of Yuichi’s devotion.

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1. Seamus Heaney, ‘Lightenings’, from ‘Squarings’, in Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 336.