It was Youth Day in Singapore Yesterday, so I am currently on my one day school holiday today. Which gave me some time to think about youth, and specifically the ethereal teen film I saw over my June holidays, All About Lily Chou Chou. Its director, Shunji Iwai was part of the "Japanese New New Wave", where a number of filmmakers came into prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Filmmakers like Toshiaki Toyoda, Sion Sono, Takashi Miike, Kore eda, Kawase etc. This coincided with the economic downturn of the early 1990s and the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, which caused a breakdown in Japanese society as a whole and most importantly for this post, a rise in juvenile delinquency rates. It was around this period that stuff like the 1997 Kobe child murders made headlines, and in 1998, 192 school students took their own lives. Keen to capture the zeitgeist, the former 3 filmmakers I mentioned all made films about disaffected youth, like Blue Spring, Suicide Club, and Fudoh, among many others I have not mentioned (At this point I would probably try to draw a comparison to the Japanese new wave of the 60s, particularly Oshima, but unfortunately I have not seen any of his films).
In the 2 films that I have seen from Shunji Iwai, Swallowtail Butterfly and Lily Chou Chou, both are centered around teenage protagonists, and he certainly seems to work better with stories about youth than about immigration. Swallowtail Butterfly, while earnest in its intentions and terrifically entertaining, it is also a tonally uneven mish mash of genre and stylistic exercises that really doesn't have a lot to say about the immigration experience or systematic xenophobia in Japan. In other words, a lot of sympathy, but not much empathy or curiosity. All About Lily Chou Chou on the other hand, is a much slower and clear headed experience, though both retain their complex narratives, with one have multiple separate but interlocking parts and the other being elliptical and non linear.
Based on what I have read about Shunji Iwai and particularly the process of making Lily Chou Chou, I have a sneaking suspicion that he is unwilling to let go of his childhood and likes to live vicariously through his films, but that means that he can surrender the film's perspective completely to his characters. Several scenes are actually shot by the actors using digital cameras which adds to the lived in, realistic feel. Speaking of actors, he uses actual teenagers, which makes the awkwardness in their interactions feel astonishingly authentic. The music too is a key part of the puzzle; as its played more and more often, it almost coaxes us into a meditative state, which is curiously the same effect it has on the characters. In terms of cinematography, the camera drifts, glides, and soars like a disembodied spirit listlessly observing a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The color palette alternates between vibrantly saturated and drearily washed-out, less concerned with naturalism than with conveying a particular mood. But perhaps most important is the elliptical and non linear narrative, which mirrors the confusion from these teenagers's point of view; such that we too aren't sure how one event even leads to the next, or how someone can turn from a friend to a bully seemingly overnight.
Therein lies the crux of the film: Iwai isn't really interested in speculative psychoanalysis of his characters as individuals, and the sooner we as an audience realise it, the more we get out of this film. What he is more interested in is in the conditions that allowed these kids to spiral so violently in the first place, and what it tells us about the state of our society today. And here it is precisely why the narrative structure becomes crucial. The perspectives of different students that we see are all incomplete by design, because we only can see fragments that are each dominated by their own worldview. The adults are unable to empathise with their children and have a negligible presence in their lives. The students are likewise too preoccupied by themselves, like all teenagers, such that communication is nigh impossible because they feel there is no one else that would understand them, no one else except a mysterious singer whose music provides temporary salvation. And all of them are unable to recognise the impact of a disintegrating social cohesion in the face of an economic downturn. There are hints to that throughout the film; the collapse of a factory Hoshino's father was working at, rise in juvenile delinquency in the news, a more lonely and materialistic society, and general pessimism in the air as the country marched toward the new millenium.
In the face of all these changes, what remained were societal expectations of conformity. But when expectations and reality no longer meet and no alternatives are provided, the youth are thrown off the deep end and have to figure it all out by themselves in a brave new world they had no part in creating in the first place. The world in Lily Chou Chou appears to be a microcosm of that. One student chooses disturbing cruelty and tyranny over their peers, another chooses to stay passive, a vessel for the social forces he feels powerless to resist. But saddest of all is the one that chooses to hide her turmoil behind a mask of positivity. For all of them, they simply exist in a reality that Yuichi calls "The age of gray", a world they are constantly in pain and unable to do anything about it. The colour is drained out of their lives by the brutal violence they experience in the face of a society that doesn't care. Yet these images of violence and isolation overlaid with Lily Chou Chou's music are what gives the music its ethereal quality, showing us the power of music to give these characters hope. (I think that being a former director of music videos, Iwai has a better understanding than most of how some songs provide a voice for those who don't have one) This interplay between the horrific and the beautiful, and the portrayal of lost children caught between the two extremes is the emotional core of the film.
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| This is the film where I truly fell hard for Yu Aoi despite her limited screentime, probably because her character is exactly how I envisioned her to be: positive in the face of tragedy (And I'm a sucker for those) It's a case of star power lending credence to a character, as noted in Bordwell's Classical Hollywood cinema. Also its just the fact that she is too cute for this world, and I dare anyone to deny it |
This is a film that teaches you how to watch it. It showed me that my desire to construct a narrative out of these fragments was blinding me to everything else that was going on. Each character is a separate story, and why the events in the film happen as a whole remains murky because we can't follow one story without taking another for granted. The presence of the internet exemplifies this dissonance, because it allows our characters to present themselves however they like online; essentially a literal manifestation of what we overlook in real life. The online world acts as both a mask to hide the ugliness that we don't want others to see, and a representation of our desires. It is only in this world that our characters can open up about their pain and receive the empathy that they so desperately need. The black text cards that show up so often remind me of silent film intertitles, and they are also alike in that both serve the function of showing what cannot be said. As their real life deteriorates, they feel an ever greater need to protect their sanctuary, and the ether takes on a almost religious stature, all while they fail to recognise their shared pain in their real life interactions. Inevitably, the boundaries between the real world and the online world will disappear, as when Yuichi attempts to consummate his online relationship in real life ends in tragedy.
In that respect the film has been very prescient. During the pandemic, people moved online en masse and the capacity for communication became greater than ever, yet more and more people felt isolated. The proliferation of the internet led to a new understanding of self as multiple personas that we could swap between at will depending on context. I sometimes feel the disconnect between my digital identity and my real life identity, and in a sense I relate to the characters in their desire to escape the cruel world to a a safe space. In fact, my passion for anime and films began as a response to feeling like I didn't have any true friends that I could confide in. When I was around 14-15 (which honestly isn't that long ago), I remember waking up everyday praying for school to end so that I could go home and escape from the world. However, the separation between these two "lives" only served to highlight the former. I would imagine that the film's status as a cult classic among young people today is because it captured that visceral feeling of trying to reconcile their identities in a way that few films can do. In discussing the possibilities and limits of human connection across screens then, the film is decidedly ambivalent. The internet offers unparalleled opportunities for connections, but can these connections stand the test of a real life encounter? The idea that one can be simultaneously being connected to everything and nothing at once continues to be pertinent today.
In summary, the film leaps beyond conventions by refusing to offer us a satisfying explanation for why these kids act the way they do, and instead uses them to paint an incomplete portrait of a diseased society on the cusp of the digital age. Which bring me on to my last point: Iwai understands that in any such society, it is always the most vulnerable that bears the brunt of the consequences, a fact that adults unfortunately too often forget.
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| Lashing out at the world and screaming out your pain |
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