ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU HULU MOVIE
ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU HULU FULL
ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU HULU SERIES

If the narrative progress of Iwai's film is sometimes baffling, what keeps you watching are his lustrous images and the complexity of his portrayal of middle-class Japan in decline. Like most of the film's characters, Kuno is eventually victimized by the dashing bully Hoshino, an enigmatic character who is cruel and violent without seeming entirely unsympathetic. I may be misinterpreting some of the ambiguous information in 'All About Lily Chou-Chou,' but it seems as though Kuno sat next to Yuichi one day in school and introduced him to Lily's music, but he's never gotten up the courage to talk to her since (although they may have communicated pseudonymously online).

ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU HULU FULL

Indeed, as we gradually piece together, Yuichi is full of unresolved longing for a long-haired girl named Kuno (Ayumi Ito), a classical pianist who favors Debussy and is herself a pariah among the bitchy girl-cliques.

If Yuichi is pretty much the classic wounded adolescent of world cinema, transposed to the age of chat rooms and digital video, that doesn't stop us from pining for a time when he will be less awkward and his life a little easier. Ichihara is a handsome, slight kid who can simultaneously convey curiosity and sullenness.

ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU HULU SERIES

In between his sessions in an online chat-room devoted to Lily - rendered as a series of explosive intertitles that interrupt and sometimes overlay the action - Yuichi must navigate a landscape of warring bullies and gangs, sadistic and seductive packs of girls and various grades of clueless, harried adults. Iwai's portrait of Japanese high-school life is dense with compelling detail. Then there's a long sideways journey in the middle, when the film temporarily becomes a homemade video of an Okinawa vacation that ends with a near-drowning while the camera sloshes around haphazardly in the surf. 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.

ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU CHOU HULU MOVIE

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 FranГ§ois 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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