All about Lily Chou
All About Lily Chou-Chou (リリイ・シュシュのすべて Rirī Shushu no Subete) is a 2001 Japanese film written and directed by Shunji Iwai. The film portrays the rough lives of high school children in Japan.
Cast
- Shugo Oshinari as Shusuke Hoshino (星野修介 Hoshino Shusuke).
- Hayato Ichihara as Yuichi Hasumi (蓮見雄一 Hasumi Yūichi), Hoshino’s former friend.
- Ayumi Ito as Yoko Kuno (久野陽子 Kuno Yōko), a classmate and love interest of Yuchi’s.
- Yû Aoi as Shiori Tsuda (津田詩織 Tsuda Shiori), a classmate of Yuichi.
- Yuki Ito as Kamino, one of the boys in the blue school uniforms at the train station when Kuno is introduced.
- Izumi Inamori as Izumi Hoshino (星野いずみ Hoshino Izumi), Hoshino’s mother.
- Salyu as Lily Chou-Chou, the enigmatic and ethereal singer that Yuichi, Tsuda and others in the film are fans of.
Plot
All About Lily Chou-Chou follows two childhood friends, Shusuke Hoshino and Yuichi Hasumi, from the end of their junior high school run until the beginning of high school. The film has a discontinuous storyline, starting midway through the story, just after high school begins, then flashes back to junior high and summer vacation, and then skips back to the present.
In junior high, Hoshino was the best student in school, but was picked on by his classmates. He was skilled at kendo, and had a good-looking young mom. Yuichi, on the other hand, was a quieter boy who fell in love with the music of the odd musician Lily Chou-Chou. During a group trip to Okinawa, Hoshino had a traumatic near-death experience and his personality changed from good-natured to dangerous and manipulative. In high school, he takes his place as class bully and shows his newfound power by ruining the lives of his classmates. An alternative voice, that of the character Shiori Tsuda, attributes Hoshino’s personality change to divorce and family ruin; this matches several scenes connecting the decline of Yuichi – who has had to change his name – to divorce.
Yuichi, the confused and shy former friend of Hoshino, finds himself sucked into his now-tormentor’s gang. He is ridiculed and coerced into doing Hoshino’s dirty work, and finds solace only in the ethereal music Lily Chou-Chou makes. Things become far worse for everyone when Yuichi is assigned to supervising Shiori Tsuda, whom Hoshino has blackmailed into enjo kōsai, and another girl is raped by Hoshino’s lackeys after unwittingly offending the school’s girl gang. The whole quagmire comes to a head when Yuichi heads to Tokyo to see a Lily Chou-Chou concert, and encounters the last person he thought would be there.
The story of Hoshino and Yuichi is paralleled by messages posted to a Lily Chou-Chou Internet message board. It is left up to the viewer to figure out which characters in the story are posting under what names.
Download
CD 1 : Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / sub