Made by the acclaimed director of Love Letter and April Story, Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou is told through the eyes of Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara), an eighth-grader obsessed with the ethereal J-Pop idol Lily Chou-Chou, a character inspired by Canto-pop artist and actress Faye Wong and compared often to Bjork. Creating a fan-site through which a loyal coterie of Lilyphiles trade gossip, information, and speculation, Yuichi takes increasing solace in this fictional world, using the strength of the community to overcome his crippling shyness and the harsh realities of the outside world, before meeting up with other devotees for real at a mega-concert. All About Lily Chou-Chou began life first as a uncompleted novel before transforming into an interactive text maintained by Iwai on the lily-holic.com website and the interactive development of the project was crucial, enhancing the parallel narratives at play in a project that expands beyond the screen and blurs boundaries between the real and the imaginary. Incorporating a hyperreal display of early digital video and an extraordinary use of rapturous music, All About Lily Chou-Chou offers sensory pleasure in abundance, whilst still intelligently addressing prescient themes of violence, bullying, and alienated adolescence, creating a vivid portrait of the disaffected Japanese youth that remains current and resonant long past its post-millennial context due to its innovative, formal experimentation and its ahead-of-its-time vision of the explosive, sometimes frightening power of online communities.
All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai | 2001 | Japan | 147’ )
Preceded by a video introduction by Joanne McNeil, author of Lurking.
