The cutting back and forth between the textual chat and the events in the film creates a strange feeling. It eventually appears that at least some of the people posting to the chat room are characters in the film we’re watching, disguised by screen names but revealing personal clues. Yūichi himself, whose screen name is Philia, says that Lili’s message is conveyed through the “ether,” a concept that seems to stand in for a sense of spiritual elevation, a way of floating above or behind the painful situations of ordinary life. Throughout the film, we’re shown chat room texts and conversations.
(The closest match I can come up with is the Icelandic recording artist Björk.) Anyway, although the film is ironically titled All About Lily Chou-Chou, it’s not all about her at all, but about a group of young people, including one devoted fan named Yūichi who runs a chat room where kids talk about Lily and her music. Lily Chou-Chou is a fictional pop star, a singer of moody avant-garde compositions that provide meaning and escape for fans in their early teens trying to get through their confusing alienated lives. As it turns out, the word “ether” is employed as a weird thematic element here. But Iwai captured something that hasn’t changed-the young minds compartmentalizing their real life from a separate place of imagination and escape, as if this special place was floating above them in the ether, as it were. The internet is a new element in that drama, in the form of a chat room devoted to a pop star-relevant today, even though you might think the medium would seem outdated now. The way it portrays kids in that age group-basically ages 13 through 15-is still innovative twenty years later. It’s a film about a time in a person’s life that is uniquely intense: early adolescence. That year, a film by Japanese writer-director Shunji Iwai was released called All About Lily Chou-Chou.
Twenty years ago, in 2001, the internet was really taking off-the steady increase in internet use was accelerating, especially among young people. Twenty years after the release of Shunji Iwai’s film about early adolescence, the movie’s insights and prescience about the effects of the internet are still remarkably fresh. Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:04:42
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