All About Lily Chou Chou is a beautiful film about pain, isolation, inspiration, and living. It’s about not getting along with the harshness of reality, and escaping into music and obsession. The characters struggle to understand the world around them, and people, and themselves. They try to connect, but are crushed by circumstances and repeatedly hurt by one another. Their stories are told in snapshot slices of life, panoramas of experience themselves stark and isolated.

The music, ranging from the solo piano of Debussy’s Arabesque, to Salyu’s ethereal song of the same name, paints vivid swathes of emotion from start to finish. It makes the brilliant greens greener and the country sky wider and bluer. It speaks for the characters when they aren’t able to. It’s music as a friend and confidante when no one else will be: It comforts and reassures, it inspires reckless abandon one moment, and appreciation of simple existence the next. In this movie, the music is as much a character as anyone else.

I apologize for being pretty bad at movie reviews, but what I will say, is that this is well worth seeing for anyone who can enjoy a challenging film with real human emotion and lush, expressive atmosphere.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2006 at 4:48 am and is filed under Japanese Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.