Apt, too, since much of the players here might as well be drowning before our eyes. Because of it, everything seems to be set underwater, which undoubtedly adds to the dreamy, ethereal quality of the film. The lighting is overwhelming and harsh, with all light sources both natural and synthetic drowning the environment in deep whites. Such that it is, Iwai has crafted something here most unlike conventional storytelling-to its benefit, and to its detriment.Ĭinematographer Noboru Shinoda shoots always in handheld, the camera usually sweeping through the stage like a curious creature studying something unfamiliar. Yet, so much of this film's identity is produced from that very hysteria, blending music and film in a way that makes this part music video, part experimental filmmaking, and part drama. To the point where I even wonder how it all would have fared had the film been told straight. Like much of the work of François Truffaut, here we have troubled youth and the sexual politics between men and women: a Japanese remix of The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim.īut the formalist frenzy of the French New Wave and the neorealist dramatics of Yang-here in this cinematic concoction of Iwai's-somewhat works against one another, making for an experience that is otherwise palpably meandering and overwrought to some degree often leaving those climactic moments of violence feel somewhat like a passerby in the narrative when they instead should be hitting like a ton of bricks. Not to mention much of the film's technical and storytelling makeup seems to borrow from the formalist hysterics of the French New Wave, this film and La Nouvelle Vague sharing an aim to remind you time and time again that this is a film: heightened use of color and lighting, pervasive onscreen text, jump cuts, and its play with both digital and film formats. In the paradoxically titled All About Lily Chou-Chou, some will do all three.Įasy to see that writer-director Shunji Iwai was likely inspired by Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day as there is a great deal of shared DNA between the two: youth gangs, friendships brought to ruin, jealousy and envy, murder, obsession with musicians (here trading Elvis Presley from A Brighter Summer Day for Lily Chou-Chou), protracted runtimes, and star-crossed romance. They'll say they will do anything for her, kill for her, love her until the day they die. Indeed, treating her like some kind of messiah, which is no different than how some of us feel with pop culture icons-those who formulate their personality entirely on someone who does not even know them. We only see what her fans think of her, and their lofty appraisals of her border upon the absurd. We learn nothing about the singer herself, and, in fact, you never even see her. The title of the film is, of course, unreliable. The opening onscreen text-visualized from fanmade message boards online-recalls that she was born on the day Mark David Chapman fatally shot John Lennon as if to say the death of one of the greats birthed another the world cannot exist one day without a messianic musician to worship. She is like some mythological figure spoken in the same breath as The Beatles and Björk, which, funnily enough, was the first artist I thought of when you first hear the eponymous, mythic Lily Chou-Chou, a fictional Japanese singer based on Hong Kong singer-songwriter and actress Faye Wong-who some may know as the covert "cleaning lady" from Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express. Recommendation Watchlist #12/? || louferrigno
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