Pic’s central section is a sometimes confusing, often impressionistic collection of competing characters, all with small stories of their own. Yuichi himself is more interested in another loner, Yoko (Ayumi Ito), a brilliant pianist who quietly plays Debussy. Film settles into a more regular style as it draws the ups and downs of early teen life and developing hormones.īack at school in the fall, personalities start to harden, with Shusuke turning into a gang leader and Yuichi ordered by Shusuke to watch over a classmate, Shiori (Yu Aoi), whom Shusuke is forcing to go with older men for money.
Picked on at school, Yuichi’s rescued from some femme bullies by Shusuke (Shugo Oshinari) and first learns about Lily when he sleeps over at Shusuke’s house and sees her poster. Opening half-hour could take some trimming before pic flashes back a year earlier to 1999. These are kids who are tripping out not on drugs but on a virtual, electronic-based world of CDs, email, the Internet and idolatry. In the first of several beautiful moments of calm, as Yuichi cycles off with one of Lily’s billboards, Iwai introduces the lilting strains of Debussy, which are to become a musical counterpoint to Lily’s songs throughout the movie.ĭebussy and Eric Satie were the first, claim Lily’s fans, to write “ethereal music” - but “Lily was high in the Ether even before she’d heard Debussy,” they add. Pic, ever so gradually, fills in the specifics of Yuichi’s life, largely devoted to the usual travails of junior high school and stealing CDs with his buddies. For almost a reel, Iwai bombards the screen with email messages between fans of (fictional) pop idol Lily Chou-Chou, and Yuichi swaying in the rice fields as he listens to the singer’s semi-Bjork-like trip-hop tunes. Opening immediately sets up the movie’s long, emotional arc by immersing the viewer in the world of 14-year-old Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara), who lives in a rural town with his mom, her boyfriend and the latter’s son. Though hardly noticeable, the whole picture was shot on high-grade DV, aside from two sequences (a holiday and a rape) clearly filmed on a regular Handicam. Though Japan reps the most extreme example of this electronic youth culture, pic’s observations are universal.įilm has been long in the works, starting as a draft script (inspired by Iwai watching a concert by pop diva Faye Wong in Hong Kong), then an unfinished novel, then an interactive novel fed by contributions to a Web site (Lily-holic) created by Iwai, and finally this movie. Where “Swallowtail” was a cheeky, wild-ride critique of Japan’s consumerist, yen-worshipping culture, “Lily” goes one step further, showing teenagers in thrall to virtual emotions generated by pop idols and fan sites.
0 kommentar(er)
