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"All About Lily Chou-Chou" opens with the clattering sound of a computer keyboard. Japanese characters flash up on the screen as Yuichi (Ichihara) logs onto his "Liliphilia" website to chat to other fans of the pop star Lily Chou-Chou.
It's the perfect image of writer-director Shunji Iwai's world, a place in which nothing (from bus hijackings, to pop concerts and even school trips) is experienced first hand, because it's always mediated through technology that distances individuals from each other - often with disastrous results.
Yuichi's turbulent life in secondary school begins as he befriends Hoshino (Oshinari), joins the kendo club, and gets mixed up in the odd spell of petty crime. But after a lavish trip to Okinawa (that's paid for with stolen money) ends with an unexpected death, Hoshino begins to change. Returning to school, he defeats the school bully and begins a reign of terror that no one, not even Yuichi, is safe from.
Relying on a confusing flashback structure and a ponderous accumulation of incidental detail, "Lily Chou-Chou" is desperately in need of some streamlining. Yet, for all its meandering lack of focus, Shunji Iwai's apocalyptic vision of teenage angst creates some fascinating sequences (such as the boys' dreamlike trip to Okinawa, filmed through their digital video camera). The result is a film that's flawed and brilliant in equal measure.
Fashioning this tale of teenage alienation into a much grander project about pop culture, technology and the breakdown of human relationships, "Lily Chou-Chou" further proves Japan's growing reputation for producing haunting and disturbing cinema.
In Japanese with English subtitles.
