The pain and shame is both heightened in the constant theater of adolescence and carried about in internalized impotence and anger. Faithful to contemporary Japan, there are bullies and their bullied, a particularly painful phenomenon because bullying is both public and private trauma. It’s a mindset crucial to the self-grouping of high school, adult society in miniature, and this community through music gives hope to the trials of All About Lily Chou-Chou, which is not a happy film. Iwai’s always-imminent image-clearing text intrudes to insist upon music as an experience that lives and breathes through such collectives. There may be little melodic difference, for example, between the thousands of punk music scenes, but don’t dare say that to the fans in each. Far from a pop star’s semantic placeholder, this “ether” in Iwai’s hands comes to represent a social truth about pop music: what distinguishes its endless varieties is not always (or at all) the music itself but the community that listens to it. It may sound dippy or cult-of-personality-ish, but not a single line of sarcasm ever types out in the earnest debates and shared, abstracted agonies of fandom. Most of the text is couched in the mythos the singer cultivates about “the ether,” a kind of global unconscious that needs tending like chi forces. Sometimes Iwai lets the words remain superimposed over the proceeding images, but never enough to push the film into the stuffy vocabulary of multimedia. In Iwai’s rendering, the screen goes black, sometimes abruptly, as white computer text splashes out, 10 to 15 words in spastic touch-typed bunches. It’s a presence Iwai boldly conveys through the modern teenager’s twist on marathon phone calls and hallway huddles: instant messaging, in a chat room devoted to the singer. She does not appear onscreen in person (except once, as an apparition on a grainy Jumbotron), but she seems a waking, walking dream in the minds of her young fans. The imaginary pop idol Lily Chou-Chou is the invisible sun that the students orbit in Iwai’s luminous rural-prefecture landscape. Together, their films form a composite portrait of music at the edge of emotional extremity, and its paradoxes of communion and disconnect. Iwai deploys the alternating contemplative and abrupt sound-bridges and drifting cameras of a melancholy song’s music video, and with great facility, but his greater formal triumph is the expression of collective musical experience through unmusical means. Ramsay expresses her heroine’s narcosis of grief and shock of displacement through a subjective, trance-like soundtrack, as well as silences that swallow you whole. But Lynne Ramsay and Shunji Iwai actually work hard to situate us inside their characters’ heads, or rather, between their ears, through a kind of headphone subjectivity. The films themselves befuddled audiences, from Morvern’s open-ended wandering to the precisely adolescent mix of passion and apathy that mark the lives of the junior high Lily fans. He leaves her a mix tape and an unpublished novel, which, naively punk to his over-determined romanticism, she passes off as her own. The latter sounds more like a mountain village or a villain than the name of its shell-shocked protagonist, a Scotswoman whose boyfriend has committed suicide. As for the first, it’s not all about a little girl with a lollipop but a group of Japanese teenagers, many of whom worship a self-mythologizing pop star called Lily Chou-Chou. All About Lily Chou-Chou meets Morvern Callarīoth titles are a mouthful, each a misleading prologue.
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