The dramatics don’t matter as much as Iwai’s sullen atmospherics: The recurrent and hardly original image of a miserable teen standing in the wilderness listening on his earphones acquires a fiercely iconic melancholy. (You’d be hard-pressed to find rogue pixels, even though Iwai seems to have exposed the whole movie at daybreak.) Primary protagonist Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) is a 15-year-old wallflower completely submerged in “Lilyphilia,” which he further promulgates by mastering a fan site and ruminating upon his idol’s enigmatic lyrics and relationship with her Force-like “ether.” The chat-sourced out of thousands of posts accumulated on Iwai’s Lily Web site, which predated the script-is communal and needy, but soon enough Yuichi is pushed from his hibernation by another gawky outcast (Shugo Oshinari), who suddenly matures into a gang leader and pimp. Iwai’s ellipticality can be pretty stingy with narrative cues-flashbacks are scant signified, and jump cuts leave out massive amounts of motivating incident-but Lily Chou-Chou is a precision-made mystery tour, and possibly the loveliest film ever shot on high-def video. Meanwhile, the story wanders like a brooding punk, and the camera succumbs to swooping perspectives, hyper-green grasslands, dust devils, desolate consumer aisles, and spasms of home-video horror. Iwai’s teens can only express themselves online, forming a worshipful chorus at the altar of the fictitious Tori Amos/Enya-esque diva of the title. Channeling youthful discontent isn’t as easy as it used to be before technology provided an infinite underground, but Iwai fashions pensive cyber-lyricism out of a new generation’s instruments of introversion: In lieu of narration, his film is counter-accented with the typed-out dialogue of fan chat rooms. To judge by the culture we see, the capitalist fields of East Asia-predominantly Japan, Taiwan, and Korea-are enduring magma slides of teenage angst-anomie, and Shunji Iwai’s two-and-a-half-hour ballade, All About Lily Chou-Chou, may be the ‘geist’s Quadrophenia. An overripe pop song: Yu Aoi in All About Lily Chou-Chou photo: Cowboy Pictures
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