You've eaten the candy bar, now see the film

One of Filmbrain's favorite films of 2001 was Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou-Chou -- a rather hard-hitting portrait of a group of Japanese high school students that navigates around an almost mythical pop-star, Lily Chou Chou. Unlike other similar-themed films, Iwai looked upon the kids with sympathy, and attempted to seriously address issues such as bullying, alienation, and teenage prostitution. Rather than simply lay blame or point fingers, Iwai shows the kids as products of the political, economic and social changes in Japan. The film originally began as a blog, where Iwai created the myth of Lily Chou-Chou and asked young people to post their thoughts, comments and stories. He collected these, and eventually wrote the screenplay for the film. In a somewhat similar vein comes his latest film Hana and Alice. What initially began as three short promo films for Nestle Kit-Kat bars has now been turned into a feature. (The website logged more than 3 million hits, which no doubt influenced the decision to go ahead with the project.) The story sounds very John Hughes-esque: two young girls, friends all their lives, find themselves fighting over the same boy. It seems that Iwai targeted this to the teen girl crowd, but Filmbrain is willing to give the film a chance. Friends in Japan have said that the film breaks no new ground dramatically, but it is saved by the performances of Anne Suzuki (Hana) and Yu Aoi (Alice). The big criticism was with the music. Whereas the pop songs in All About Lily Chou-Chou were integrated nicely into the story, the music here (composed by Iwai) is obtrusive and way overused. Still, Iwai's films are at their worst extremely entertaining (Love Letter), and at their best something quite profound (Swallowtail Butterfly, All About Lily Chou-Chou). Once again, doubtful that it will ever be released on these shores, but it might turn up at some festival. Check out the trailer here (hi bandwidth) and here (low).

Comments

[conell]

anne suzuki is this girl in takeshi kaneshiro's movie "the returner", right? heard of it? hehe.

aren't they just so kawaii...

[FIlmbrain]

Kawaii desu nee!

Haven't seen Returner -- not really Filmbrain's cup of tea.