All about Lily Chou Chou

I’m using some spare time waiting at the amt für bürgerangelegenheiten to blog about this movie I watched last week. I wanted to to do this way earlier but I didn’t manage to, I’m too lazy 😦

One of the main reason why it took me so long is that I’m really scared to blog about this movie. If I try to tell what happened, not only will I bore you, but the risk of reader don’t watching the movie afterwards due to my poor writing might be really high. That would be a shame! Trust me the movie is really good, even though it’s incredibely slow paced… (ok people who don’t like slow paced movies shouldn’t even bother with it).

 

On the surface it’s a tale of a succesfull boy, Hoshino Shusuke, gone mad and how he will destroy the life of his former best friend, Hasumi Yuichi and of a girl in the same class, Tsuda Shiori.

Starting as an examplary schoolboy, he will read the entry talk for his fellow first year at the entrance highschool ceremony, he will after an accident during the first summer holiday change to a ruthless bully. He will force Shiori to enjo kosai and turn Yuichi into her “pimp”. The silent nature of Yuichi as well as his general helplessness will make her fall in love with him. Sadly Yuichi is already in love with another girl, Kuno Yoko. Yoko herself has quite some trouble, she is turned into an outcast by a group of tenacious girls who have found some dislike in her. This all culminates to a point where Yuichi has to bring Yoko to some abandoned warehouse where a group of boys awaits her…

The pressure and bullying on Yuichi and the two girls keep rising till the point where Shusuke take a concert ticket for a Lily Chou Chou concert, suddenly Yuichi explodes and reacts… This brings us to a more central point of the story. The only way Yuichi has to stay sane in this weird universe, after having being abandoned by all the adults, who either don’t understand the problem or simply ignore it, is in  Lily Chou Chou’s music and the “ether” that it creates, or rather where you are transported to, while listening to the music. Also the film is regularly interrupted to broadcast messages from a fan message board for Lily Chou Chou and her music.

What stands out, is the very strong dichotomy the scenes, the color, positioning everything seems so beautiful, but in a constructed way, artificial, but on the other side, the heavy use of digital camera and therefor the poor quality of image as well as the shaking of the shoot introduced an element of reality so that it becomes very difficult for the viewer to see what it actually. Especially during the okinawa vacation, who feels completely surreal from the point of view of the story and like a documentary from the point of view of the shooting as well as from the lack of direction the movie seems top have.

Last but not least, one should mention the wonderful soundtrack that completely fits the movie and emphasize it’s etheral feel.

 

 

In the end i really liked it and i thank Epikt for this movie, as well as for the rest of her blog, without which i would still be looking at either crappy or mainstream movies (or both).