All About 'All About Lily Chou-Chou'

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In the fall of 2001, I saw an unusual Japanese movie at the New York Film Festival. Directed by Shunji Iwai, it was called All About Lily Chou-Chou, and it revolved around a group of middle- and high-school students, in a rural town north of Tokyo, whose lives are, frankly, terrible. Everyone, male or female, is either a bully or getting bullied, with tactics ranging from sadistic social ostracism to fraternity-style hazing to out-and-out sexual assault. Over the course of more than two hours, we see victims become perpetrators, and their victims become perpetrators, too, with no end in sight or adult ready or able to intervene.

What unites them all, however, is their love of Lily Chou-Chou, a fictional pop star whose ethereal music—inspired by Björk, Kate Bush, Faye Wong, and UA, and performed by the Japanese singer Salyu—is the sonic backdrop to the teens’ misery. Lily is the one who sings their true feelings, their loneliness, their hopelessness, their dreams of escape; their posts on an early Internet message board flit across the screen, signed with handles like Philia and Blue Cat, all testifying to the power of Lily’s music and their inability to connect anywhere but online and anonymously. The beauty of her music² —along with the jaw-droppingly lush cinematography—stands in shattering contrast to the compelling ugliness of their lives.

Reader, I fell in love with this movie. I snagged an imported DVD a couple of years later, along with the soundtrack on CD, and Lily Chou-Chou’s music became a part of my life.

At the same time, however, the movie itself seemed to vanish from public knowledge. I knew no one but my friend Ian who had seen it, or even heard of it. As Japanese pop culture became more and more accessible here in America, I figured surely I’d find other Lily Chou-Chou fans. Nope. It was as if the movie had never existed. I gave up.

But then, a couple of months ago, my 16-year-old daughter, Sasha, started asking about it, and I began to learn of Lily Chou-Chou’s afterlife.

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For years, Sasha was only vaguely aware of Lily Chou-Chou. The songs had shown up on family Spotify playlists, and I’d surely talked about the movie from time to time, but while I’d hoped she’d one day watch it, I know better now than to simply suggest such things: Insist too hard, too often, and this kid will never comply.

Enter TikTok. There’s a trend, Sasha told me, of kids competing to dredge up the most obscure indie films to celebrate—because I guess that’s what kids do?—and All About Lily Chou-Chou was among them.

@wuxiansbff

#allaboutlilychouchou #lilychouchou

A lot of the TikToks are fan edits—supercuts of favorite moments, sometimes focused on a favorite character—while others are explainers, straight up presenting the movie and its music to newbies.

But TikTok isn’t the only place for this latter-day Lily fandom. Reddit and YouTube are littered with discussions of the movie, and a thousand random forums you’ve never heard of have posts like this:

Some of the discussions go back a decade or more, but most seem to be from the last few years, as if the movie had lain fallow, waiting to find its true audience. And it’s easy to see why the movie connects with Gen Z kids: Its sense of boredom and dread, of IRL isolation and online connection, feels very post-pandemic. What’s more, the movie’s kids look and feel like teens today: baggy T-shirts, loads of charms dangling from their bags and cell phones, and an affect that is at once world-weary and playful.

Because although I’ve made the movie sound unendingly depressing, it’s actually full of the delight of kids just being kids. They ride their bikes at night³ down roads lined with rice paddies, they have sleepovers and gaze at the stars, they walk one another home and admit (or don’t admit) crushes. In one memorable sequence, a group of boys—are they a clique or a gang?—fly to Okinawa for a few days’ vacation, hanging out on the beach, flirting with their tour guides, and for once acting like the kids they are: fresh and free. There may be a darkness hanging over them, hanging over us all, but they and we can still experience moments of wonder and connection. They may be failing, but they are trying!

For me, I still can’t get over the fact that other people know about this movie. That’s partly because All About Lily Chou-Chou isn’t some relic from my Generation X childhood: It’s a 21st-century movie that I watched as an adult, at a major American film festival, and that has been available in contemporary media formats since soon after its release. It wasn’t lost, it wasn’t crushed by bad reviews, and its director went on to make many more films. It wasn’t gate-kept¹ , as the kidz say these days; all those social-media and forum posts are opening the gates wide.

Or maybe I was a gatekeeper? All this time, I knew about it but didn’t talk or write about it, and because I saw no one else ever even mention it, I figured it was mine, all mine. It was The Movie I Love That Nobody Knows; did having that make me feel special, if only on the inside? If so, it’s a very Lily Chou-Chou feeling—the movie is, after all, about the impossibility of expressing your thoughts and emotions to anyone, even to those you’re closest to, unless you go online under a pseudonym. Maybe that’s what I should’ve done, but I’ve never been all that into Internet forums.

And anyway, I am clearly not, nor have ever been, the film’s intended audience. To watch it makes me think of my own childhood, its intersections with and divergences from those of Lily Chou-Chou’s bullies and bullied, and at times to yearn for the open-endedness of those days. As I think I’ve written before, I have tried to remain close to my sense of myself as a child, what it’s like to be both powerless and full of potential, and so maybe I’m primed to appreciate a movie like All About Lily Chou-Chou. But I can’t say the movie, in the decades I’ve been watching it and thinking about it, has ever spoken directly to who I am now, only to who I remember once having been. Instead, it seems to be speaking directly to a new crop of young people, who see in it a reflection of their own lives as they are right now.

How wonderful that must be for the film’s director, to have created a work that develops a new, devoted audience only decades later. That’s certainly something I think about often: As someone who has written and written and written, I’ve never known exactly where each piece will land. Will it find fans in an instant, or will it sink out of sight? And if the latter, might it still survive long enough to connect, years or decades down the moonlit road, with a new cohort, perhaps one not even born when I wrote the words? Is this essay itself too early? Has it been sitting in your inbox for weeks or months, skipped over because you didn’t recognize the movie title, and only now, perhaps because you saw a TikTok blip about it, have you returned to it to see what I’ve said?

If so, please let me know in the comments. It’s a safe space, where we won’t judge or bully you, and, if you like, you can remain anonymous. 🪨🪨🪨

All About Lily Chou-Chou is streaming for free on Amazon Prime and on the Roku Channel. It’s streaming elsewhere, too, but you have to pay.

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1  Quentin Tarantino apparently once said the soundtrack “is really cool to make out to.”

2  Which is interspersed with some lovely Debussy piano pieces.

3  When I watched it recently with Sasha, she really loved this part: Her dream is ride a bike (safely) around at night with her friends.