Riri Shushu no subete
Tags: violence, cult, murder, sadist, flashback

Plot synopsis:
All About Lily Chou-Chou follows two boys, Shūsuke Hoshino and Yūichi Hasumi, from the start of junior middle school when they first meet, and into second grade. The film has a discontinuous storyline, starting midway through the story, just after the second term of junior high school begins, then flashes back to the first term and summer vacation, and then skips back to the present.
In elementary school, Hoshino was one of the best students in school, but was picked on by his classmates. Hoshino and Hasumi meet and become friends when they join the kendo club, and Hoshino invites Hasumi to stay over at his house. Hoshino's family is wealthy in comparison to Hasumi's family. Hasumi mistakes Hoshino's attractive young mother for his sister.
The kendo club summer camp training is tough, and Hoshino, Hasumi and some other first-grade boys decide to take a trip to Okinawa. Once there, Hoshino has a traumatic near-death experience and his personality changes from good-natured to dangerous and manipulative. Back at school in September for second term, he takes his place as class bully and shows his newfound power by ruining the lives of his classmates. An alternative voice, that of the character Sumika Kanzaki, attributes Hoshino's personality change to the collapse of his family's business and his parent's divorce; this matches several scenes connecting the decline of Hoshino – who has had to change his name – to divorce.
Hasumi, the confused and shy former friend of Hoshino, finds himself sucked into his now-tormentor's gang. He is ridiculed and coerced into doing Hoshino's dirty work, and finds solace only in the ethereal music Lily Chou-Chou makes, and acting as web editor for his fan website. Things become far worse for everyone when Hasumi is assigned to supervising Shiori Tsuda, whom Hoshino has blackmailed into enjo kōsai, and another girl is raped by Hoshino's lackeys after unwittingly offending the school's girl gang. The whole quagmire comes to a head when Hasumi heads to Tokyo to see a Lily Chou-Chou concert, where he encounters the last person he thought would be there.
The story of Hoshino and Hasumi is paralleled by messages posted to a Lily Chou-Chou message board which are displayed on screen. Until the meeting at the concert, it is left up to the viewer to figure out which characters in the story are posting under what names.

Review: This little obscurity: lyrical breath and pulse from life.In 1968, there was a film made in Japan called Nanami: Inferno of First Love, also Japanese New Wave about confused, apprehensive youth feeling the first pulls to join the fray of existence: love, pain, loss, all the adult stuff they used to know as words.
The calligraphic eye.So every rejection of tradition that we find in those films, or this one now, only serves to re-discover what was so vital and groundbreaking about Japanese tradition in the first place.In other words: if the old Zen Masters were alive now, all of them exceptional poets or landscape painters in their day and with a great sense of humor, they would all be New Wave filmmakers.This is as Zen as possible and in the most pure sense of the term.
"all about lily chou chou" begins with a series of manually keystroked chat-room-style statements that introduce facts and ideas, mostly related to mythical pop-star "lily chou chou."  this sort of cinematic introduction sounds similar to many other computer-age-themed films, but amazingly the keystroke dialogue between several anonymous internet fanatics continues past the credits and runs through almost the entire movie.
the nicely-scripted, brilliantly executed text acts as the backbone that beautifully holds together a story that is ultimately about many things, including the fragility of relationships and the personas we use based on them, fanatical envy and love contrasted against blind rage and hate, metamorphosis, and technology versus nature.although executed in an arguably confusing manner, consisting of many non-chronological vignettes, the film ultimately succeeds in depicting a modern-day story involving the relationship between two early-adolescent japanese boys, their journey through life and school, their changing identities, and their fascination with and "connection" to the strangely popular musician, lily chou chou.
during the non-video portions of the film, the colors are beautifully rich, with verdant fields and saturated skies.the abrupt, but fitting pattern between flowing, dreamlike camerawork, shaky camerawork, textual discourse, and the eerily sensual, fictitious lily chou chou tracks provide a momentum that is both refreshing in its originality but effectively discomforting.
If you know a little bit about Japanese life and culture, the emotions of youth, and devotion to an artist then you can watch this movie and understand it.
He also chose a beautiful selection of music to accompany his film, from Debussy to old Okinawan songs to Lily Chou Chou's own.
This is a tale about the lows of a group of high school kids that turn to crime and cyberspace obsession of a pop singer named Lily Chou-Chou.Writer/director Shunji Iwai film is complex, dark and depressing, with a real intense feel of teenage angst, but truly it's a beautiful film to watch.
Shunji Iwai gives us disturbing images of youth's harrowing experiences, in which some characters you feel for, but then after a while you might suddenly despise or the opposite.With visually stunning and fresh cinematography, it felt like I was watching an arty music video clip at times.
The music really added to the beauty and mystique of this film.Hayato Ichihara as Yûichi Hasumi, a troubled kid that is involve in a crime gang and under an alias, runs the fan club website about Lily Chou-Chou, Shûgo Oshinari as Shusuke Hoshino, once a top student and then suddenly changes and becomes a gang leader and Ayumi Ito as the quiet Yôko Kuno, an outstanding piano player but because of that she is bullied.
The performances are brilliantly absorbing and there are no hiccups to say off.Since the Lily Chou-Chou Website is an important part of the film, we don't actually see anyone in front of the computer screen, except for Yuichi.
There are a couple of surprises that you don't see coming and the story might have its flaws- but they didn't seem to bother me, as I was simply engrossed with the dense context of the film.Like I typed before this is an haunting and intense tale about teenage angst, there is a lot of agonizing imagery and confronting situations like violence, depression, rape, suicide, prostitution and bullying.
Trying to find meaning in Lilly Chou-Chou is similar to attempting to find meaning in ambient electronic music, as we watch the movie we are detached, the story, so to speak, unfolds gracefully but the audience can not relate to the characters, but can only attempt to make sense of it all.
Lilly Chou-Chou is in my opinion a great achievement of movie making, interms of acting, editing, sound mixing and visual flair, fans of cinema are treated to something entirely fresh, but there is the overall feeling of dissatisfaction, I wanted more from the story, I wanted to see more of the characters, more of their lives and their interaction with one another.
I watched All About Lily Chou-Chou on about the end of my high school life and I must say that I was moved with the entire story and Shunji Iwai's brilliance.First off, the music was excellent - Salyu (or Lily) has this ethereal voice that haunts me every time the movie comes into mind, strengthening the entire atmosphere of the movie.It also shows the usual Japanese high school dimension of bullying which is very common, but the movie just shows a more intense depth to it.What makes the movie tick for me I guess would be that the main character (Yuuichi) although predominantly a shy and quiet boy, he developed through the various circumstances and thus leads to the end (which I will not spoil.) I can say that the pace of the movie is just enough to make you feel the emotions the characters portray given minimalistic dialogue and instead replaced by revolving BBS messages and lush green scenery.I give it a 10 out of 10 for everything - cinematography, plot, music.
I'm not sure what I'm about to write yet but it may be worth taking it with a pinch of salt, since I'm unable to get over just how much I love this movie.Even if it doesn't resonate with you, "All About Lily..." is still clearly a film of a high artistic standard.
Such music and images, coupled with the use of a digital camera which does bizarre things with light (sometimes the camera will be in a room and it looks like the sun is right outside the window), give the film a hypnotic, surreal quality.
All About Lily Chou-Chou went on the first position of my top 10 soon after the first view, let me tell you why: AALCC is a movie absolutely like nothing else, it's a story that can be perfectly reflected on some of our lives, our youth.Who has never felt alone and lost in his teen years?
Maybe by being influenced by some friends.Well Shunji Iwai know well this, and he struggled well to create an absolute idol, an hope for his young boys: that's Lily Chou-Chou.This girl with an unbelievable voice is truly the protagonist of this movie, her music surround every single frame, affecting every single action made by the young guys, she's like a goddess that watches her disciples.The directing is, as you can expect from Iwai, magnificent: in particular the handy cam work is simply fantastic, you can feel almost to touch the guy's hearts and feel also accomplice for their suffering.Maybe this is not a movie, maybe it's only a 140 minutes PV, but even is it, I don't care: when you'll hear Lily, you'll never forget her..
Then I remembered, yes, this was an awful time14 years old; insanely alive and confusedI watched the making-of documentary of the internet-novel-turned-film and understood why All About Lily Chou-Chou had won awards from both the 2002 Berlin and Shanghai International Film Festivals.
However, if you're willing to work a little harder at piecing the whole thing together, then the film will reward; not necessarily in the sense of being the kind of film that will leave you all warm and fuzzy inside, but rather, in the way that it forces us to think about certain ideas expressed through the characters and the atmosphere that is created through the incredibly stylised and hyper-real methods that the director employs.
For example, the opening image of the film - of our central character suspended in time within a vast, green, ocean-like field of waving reeds - is reminiscent of a number of films, from Shindô's Onibaba (1964) to Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev (1969) and Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), but combined with that almost Kieslowski-like use of music and the further hints to Godard presented by the use of on-screen inter-titles, which here reveal elements of character background in a way that is entirely fitting to the uncharacteristic world that the film creates.Despite these references, the film never feels like an exercise in imitation, with the director advancing on the influence of these particular filmmakers and creating his own world that seems to exist in a heightened state of almost dreamlike self-awareness.
The movement of the camera is constantly suggesting the illusion of freedom or the ability to escape that is contrasted brilliantly against the cramped, dimly lit locations and the use of an uninviting sepia tone to suggest further elements of an expressive visual style tied to the feelings of its characters.It is a film that feels alive with ideas and energy; painting this world of Japanese youth lost and confused as violence and degradation swells all around them.
Again, it's partly down to the fantastic visual approach that director Shunji Iwai brings to the film and the way that it complements the thoughts and feelings of the characters and the various obsessions and preoccupations that form the backbone to their world.
The characters talk about music as a life-force and how it comes to represent a kind of ether in which they are helplessly suspended, and in keeping with this notion, the film takes on these elements as well.People need to stop approaching films with a definite idea of what to expect.
The story is so true to life, especially in Japan, and i liked how it showed how completely useless adults can be for teenagers going through that high school "phase" battling with life and their own emotions and insecurities, and dealing with the true nastiness of the kids they are surrounded by every day.
The film is about a teenage boy in Japanese junior high school (early to mid teen years) who is caught up in some rather nasty circumstances that occur within his peer group, including robbery, rape and prostitution (the same set of circumstances that brought about a movie like Battle Royale, and you'll recognize some of the character types that the two films share).
To escape from the horrors of everyday life, the boy, named Yuichi, listens to the ethereal music of Lily Chou-Chou, and chats about her on the internet.
As dark as the subject matter of the film is, its point of view is stuck in the dreaminess of Lily Chou-Chou's music.
ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU (pronounced "shoo-shoo") is Shunji Iwai's ambitious paeon to rougher high-school days, a coming-of-age film that confronts the bullying problem that has apparently become endemic in many Japanese schools.
One certainly cannot fault the film's willingness to confront certain social realities in imaginative ways.The LILY in the title is a pop singer whose songs about alienation and pain affect a disillusioned group of high school kids who stay in touch, for the most part anonymously, thanks to a computer chat room.
To Iwai, it's all just survival of the fittest, whether in remote Okinawa or during a high school break, but the delivery and substance if the film combine to make you, at times, feel nauseous.But the photography, at its best, can be striking, and the concept of using technological devices to color the narrative is interesting, at least at the beginning.
As the alienated teenagers wander aimlessly throughout the film, Lily Chou Chou's melodies seem to be the only element that brings their lives some sort of harmony – which makes the soundtrack one of the real highlights of the film.The visual style is also distinctive: The plot is intercut between the characters school life and an on-screen text telling us what is being said in a Lily Chou-Chou online chat room - juxtaposing the different identities the teenagers have online and in the real world.
The camera-work is peculiar yet effective: It is mostly hand-held and has a sort of dreamy/documentary type look, often times gliding through the scenes with certain Malick-like qualities.My main issue with the film was with the characters development: some of the characters aren't as well step up and their actions go from being unpredictable to borderline implausible.
Shunji Iwai's coming-of-age film All About Lily Chou-Chou is an unusual stream of melancholic images accompanied by dreamy music and overexposed imagery which renders this entire experience as a jumbled collection of fuzzy memories held together by a string of message board posts from a certain blog.
It's a loose story about increasing alienation and the effects it has on adolescents, who start to escape the real world issues through the Ether, a mystical state of mind provided to them by a (fictional) pop singer, Lily Chou-Chou.
I admittedly liked the camera and some of the pictures in the movie but other than that All about Lily Chou Chou had little to offer for me.
!. The work of Japanese filmmaker Shunji Iwai is different from other contemporary filmmakers like Kitano Takeshi,Aoyama Shinji and Kore-Eda Hirokazu.His films about Japanese youth are known for their distinct visual style and arcane music.Most of his films clock more than 2 hours.In "All about Lily Chou Chou", we see that there are youngsters connected to each other over Internet.They make regular attempts to inform each other about their fictional pop star.They would like to live like her in a world where virtual reality will surely become a key feature of everyday existence in future.This is not a brief passage about a space colony.This is a brief description of things which have fundamentally gone wrong for Japanese households.Shunji Iwai does not show Tokyo as it is overcrowded.We see a small city where young people are facing miseries,sorrows and tremendous emotional pain."All about Lily Chou Chou" handles well many disparate themes such as breakdown of Japanese family system,bullying at school,rape and prostitution.The unique thing about this film is its soundtrack.You have to see this film to feel ether..
The dark side of Japanese culture is brought to life in Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou Chou, a disturbing look at the life of a junior high school student who seeks sanctuary from the bullying of his classmates through the music of a pop-icon, singer Lily Chou Chou.
This fifteen-minute vacation segment, saturated with brilliant color and shot by a jerky hand-held camera, contains the film's most unnerving moments, and we instinctively know that the lives of the vacationers will never be the same.In the next school year, shaken by his near drowning and the loss of his family's textile factory, Hoshino undergoes a drastic personality change.
Unable to enter the concert hall, Yuichi watches Lily's image as her videos appear on the Jumbotron outside the theater and his accumulated tension reaches the breaking point.All About Lily Chou Chou is disjointed and overlong and suffers from some stylistic excesses but it is a courageous film and a deeply moving one, a work that has the courage to confront some aspects of modern-day Japan that you will not read about in the tourist guides.
Iwai's breathtaking images together with the poetic music of Debussy capture the adolescent experience in a way that is heartbreakingly real and, although the film's shifting time line may makes the story hard to follow for some, the message comes through with unmistakable clarity.
A harsh, almost 3 hour coming of age film, All About Lilly Chou Chou takes a number of real happenings in Japan-juvenile rape, violence, degradation, murder and pop idol fixation-and throws them together for effect.
In recent years schools have tried to take a more aggressive stance on the problem and recent TV J-Doramas, like the powerful "Watashi Tachi No Kyokashou" and "Life" have also attempted to bring awareness to the issue beyond the classroom.Director Iwai Shunji tackles this sensitive subject in his thought-provoking 2001 film "Lily Chou-Chou No Subete" (All About Lily Chou-Chou).
While the title suggests a film detailing the life of the movie's fictional enigmatic and ethereal songstress Lily (singer Salya), the film's actual focus is on childhood friends Shusuke Hoshino and Yuichi Hasumi (portrayed by Oshinari Shugo and Ichihara Hayato) junior high school classmates in the Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture.
"All About Lily Chou-Chou" shares a lot of its dark tone with Larry Clark's controversial "Kids" and similarly themed "Bully" movies.
Ito does admirable work here and it is all the more amazing when one learns that she played all her own piano performances and spent several weeks mastering Debussy's complicated "Arabesque No. 1", one of the song highlights of the film.Cinematographer Shinoda Noboru's beautiful digital camera work was absolutely breathtaking and added an almost dream-like quality to the story.
"All About Lily..." is sometimes confusing in its non-linear approach to storytelling and in its novel use of BBS chat inserts that help move the narrative but the somber tone of the film along with the cautionary look at bullying, obsession and indifference deliver a stark and powerful message to the viewer..
"All About Lily Chou-Chou" was a film by Shunji Iwai, a great and inspirational director from Japan.
If there ever was a production that fit the definition, look and feel of a cult film then All About Lily Chou-Chou would be it.
All About Lily Chou-Chou is a movie that deals in teenaged alienation and admiration.
However, the film does generate a good amount of interesting scenes and relatable characters which doesn't make the movie a chore to watch.