How to respond to this, another of those films that's like nothing I've ever seen? It's beautiful and stark, and my strongest impression of Lily Chou-Chou is the loneliness that it conveys. All of the main characters - Yuichi, Hoshino, Kuno and Shiori - seem quietly desolate; it's as if there are holes inside them, or gaps between them, that can't be filled, at least in the 'real' world, away from the Ether of Lily's music and the backlit screens of the bulletin boards where they can interact, awkwardly but passionately...the bullying, then, is in some sense the cause of this damage, but it also seems to be symptomatic of a deeper rot in (Japanese) society, and particularly amongst its young.
Somehow I can't stop thinking about the movie. Initially, I was a bit confounded by the jumps backwards and forwards in time and then, having more or less worked out how all the pieces fit together (though I'll still need to watch the whole thing again to be sure), thought that they seemed pointless stylistic affectations - this all happened last night, immediately after watching it (1 - 3.30am for the viewing, and then later for the reconstruction). Having slept on it, though, I do think that those shifts add to the experience, as does the decision to shoot the whole thing on digital video - both devices better dramatise the inwardness of the protagonists and (I think) give the film more of an emotional punch than would have been possible through a more conventional, linear means of telling the story.
Everything is clouded and murky, and the few 'sunnier' moments seem, even at the time, partially occluded by subsequent sadness and the gauze of nostalgia, but somehow the colours bleed through as well. This is hardly an optimistic film - in fact, in many ways it's very depressing - but somehow it's strangely uplifting at the same time (the kite scene, say, is beautiful, and that's what makes it, in the end, terribly sad), and the film's insistence on the 'colours' of life and at least the possibility of something better are never abandoned. Indeed, the closing sequence is absolutely crushing in its balancing of these two themes - the grey of the everyday world and the colours of the other - and images of loneliness and near-connectedness (so near and yet so far, and of course it, too, is from before everything had played itself out events-wise). I don't know - it may not be for everyone, but All About Lily Chou-Chou makes a lot of sense to me.
I watched the film because a mix cd that trang gave me earlier this year had included one of its songs, but I was only a few minutes in when I realised that there was another connection - a large still of the boy standing in a green field, listening to music through his discman, had somewhere caught my eye before and in fact I'd incorporated it into one of the collages in my room (without being aware of the provenance of the image)...which now comes to form something akin to the Aimee Mann/Ghost World link, especially given that that image acquires such emotional freight over the course of the film...
Also, this is a good link to follow after watching Lily Chou-Chou - it provides a lot of the context for the film.
