For a while another boy, a charismatic, cruel James Dean type named Hoshino (Shugo Oshinari), seems to become the main character. Two characters are killed and another is raped, and on all three occasions we basically have to infer (or guess) what has happened.
Scenes don't always occur in chronological order, and some remain entirely mysterious. For all that, the film's basic outline isn't especially confusing: "All About Lily Chou-Chou" is mainly the story of Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara), a moody, near-silent teenage boy who's obsessed with a pop singer named, yep, Lily Chou-Chou. It won't make any difference to American viewers, but the film itself is actually a continuation of a sort of online soap opera Iwai launched in Japan.
Writer-director Shunji Iwai is no kid (he's 39), but his movie has a youthful restlessness, an almost compulsive daring. (At this point, its United States release consists of one theater in Manhattan, so many of you may have to wait for home video.) If your taste runs to "difficult" films you absolutely can't miss it. As that comparison suggests, I loved "All About Lily Chou-Chou" despite its problems, or at least I greatly admired its crystalline, high-definition video look, its explosive feel, its wealth of ideas, its willingness to go anywhere and do anything. Then again, some of the same criticisms could apply to François Truffaut's "The 400 Blows," a movie that bears more than a passing similarity to this one. Like "Eureka," "All About Lily Chou-Chou" is arguably too ambitious, too all-encompassing and too concerned with flouting narrative convention for its own good. I can't claim to have done more than stick my toes in the water - mainly by sitting through Shinji Aoyama's remarkable three and a half hour "Eureka" - but "All About Lily Chou-Chou," a sprawling and adventurous tale of teen alienation, might just be the movie that pushes the Japanese new wave out of the film-geek ghetto. Younger filmmakers have begun to emerge who draw inspiration from a host of sources, including pop music, the French New Wave and traditional Japanese cinema, but hardly at all from Hollywood (beyond, maybe, Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Ray). Something new, and pretty close to mind-blowing, has been brewing in Japanese cinema over the past decade or so.
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