All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001)

The adolescent coming-of-age film All About Lily Chou-Chou is audacious in its structure, but not wholly successful, even if it should get kudos for looking at universal youthful experiences with unsentimental honesty that's uncommon in the cinema. While the frequent takeovers of the movie screen by computer screens (of online chat among some of the characters) is bold and marks this as a work determined to use the vernacular of its era, it's also aggravatingly distracting. And make no mistake, it's not something that's just an occasional irritant -- it's in your face, inserted right into the heart of the action. More of a problem to the general audience, perhaps, is that the action isn't all that easy to follow and the characters not so easy to keep straight -- something that can't, for non-Japanese viewers, be put wholly down to the linguistic and cultural differences inherent to watching a Japanese movie. Weeding through the tangle, there are some effectively harsh mini-vignettes reflecting painful early teenage traumas that almost anyone throughout the globe can relate to: the bullying into virtually criminal behavior through peer pressure, the retreat into worship of musical idols as escape from mundane and sometimes unpleasant realities, the inability to wholly fit in at school or at home, and the cruel ways that kids can treat each other. If some of the scenarios are more extreme than many people grew up with -- such as the girl coerced into humiliating prostitution by fellow teenagers -- the tone of the anguish will ring true with everyone's adolescent trials. The detached, jumbled way in which it's presented, however, might dilute its impact more than the filmmaker intended. ~ Richie Unterberger, All Movie Guide