![]() Unable to enter the concert hall, Yuichi watches Lily's image as her videos appear on the Jumbotron outside the theater and his accumulated tension reaches the breaking point. When Lily comes to town for a sold-out concert, Hoshino assaults his dignity one more time. It is exasperating to see Yuichi passively follow Hoshino's demands, but Iwai has crafted his character so that we can all feel the pain of those who lack the power to stand up for themselves. Yuichi is also forced to set up an attack on Kuno (Ayumi Ito), a gifted pianist and a girl he has feelings for but lacks the self-confidence to communicate with. Yuichi passively agrees to Hoshino's demands but their friendship becomes increasingly strained when he tells him to follow and watch Shiori, a girl that likes him but cannot express her feelings. The only response a teacher has to a girl who had her head shaven was to buy her a wig. Sadly, the adults in the story seem helpless and can only respond in an uncomprehending manner. He assaults the school bully, Inubushi and becomes a bully himself, forcing Yuichi to become involved in bullying others, robbery, and running a prostitution ring involving one of their classmates, Shiori Tsuda (Yu Aoi). In the next school year, shaken by his near drowning and the loss of his family's textile factory, Hoshino undergoes a drastic personality change. This fifteen-minute vacation segment, saturated with brilliant color and shot by a jerky hand-held camera, contains the film's most unnerving moments, and we instinctively know that the lives of the vacationers will never be the same. Their friendship shifts, however, after a summer vacation in Okinawa full of strange events in which Hoshino is almost drowned and they witness a serious traffic accident. When Yuichi spends the night at his house, Hoshino introduces him to Lily. In a flashback to their first year at school, fellow student Hoshino (Shugo Oshinari), known on the message boards as Blue Cat, reaches out to Yuichi after being ridiculed in school and both join the Kendo club. He is robbed, forced to perform a sexual act in front of local toughs and humiliated by his teacher and mother when he is caught stealing a Lily CD. Left on his own most of the time to deal with his peers, his life is a struggle for survival. But lately my Ether is running out." Yuichi lives with his mother, a hairdresser, her boyfriend and his son. Another comments, ".For me, only the Ether is proof I'm alive. "Imagine being dead", someone writes, "won't that be great?" Someone else writes that once he got to Junior High School his world went gray. The communications, based on actual web messages, are revealing of the poster's frame of mind. He is a slender boy of fourteen whose devotion to Lily is an article of faith in his world of loneliness and nihilism. The boy's screen name is Philia but his real name is Yuichi Hasumi (Hayato Ichihara). The posters are brought together by their love of Lily who, to her fans, is a voice that comes from "the Ether", carrying the status of an otherworldly goddess. With his headphones on, he clings to his Discman while we hear a soft sensuous voice singing in the background and read the text of Internet messages clicking on the bottom of the screen. Shot on high-definition video, the film opens in a rice field where a sad-eyed young boy stands in the middle of a wide expanse of green. The dark side of Japanese culture is brought to life in Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou Chou, a disturbing look at the life of a junior high school student who seeks sanctuary from the bullying of his classmates through the music of a pop-icon, singer Lily Chou Chou. Recently, however, Japanese schools have become increasingly dangerous places with an increase in violent crimes, breakdown of order in classrooms (gakkyuu houkai), bullying and intimidation of weak or delicate students (ijime), and a high suicide rate. Japan is a culture traditionally built on respect, concern for the other person, courtesy, honesty, and discipline.
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