SPECIAL EDITION COLLECTORS’ SET FEATURES: These “White Films” express Shunji Iwai’s unique view on young love and loneliness and exemplify the dreamy landscapes he nostalgically maps in his films. Linked by their cold introductions, Iwai and Shinoda’s subsequent films – 1998’s April Story, about a shy girl’s move to university, and 2004’s romantic con-job hana & alice – trace the changing times as much as the changing hearts of their characters, and collapse style and substance into lyrical poetry. Audiences quickly embraced Iwai’s treatment of grief and love with his smash debut Love Letter, about a woman rediscovering her late fiancé through letters exchanged with his former classmate. With the hazy, sentimental lens of his regular cinematographer Noboru Shinoda, Iwai’s early feature films explore pivotal moments in teenage life through the mundane challenges of the everyday.
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"Lily Chou-Chou" has been compared by some to Truffaut's " The 400 Blows," which was also stylistically groundbreaking in its time, but Truffaut broke with traditional styles in order to communicate better, not to avoid communicating at all.The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films presents Shunji Iwai’s White Films – Love Letter, April Story and hana & alice.įew filmmakers capture the wonder and angst of young adulthood like Japanese writer-director Shunji Iwai. Shunji Iwai has gone to a great deal of trouble to obscure it. The film's teachers and adults care, but are hopelessly misinformed about what is really going on. Yuichi's life has been turned into hell by Hoshino, who seems to act not so much out of hatred as boredom. Shiori has sex with strangers for pay, but is too shy to tell Yuichi she likes him. These students drift without values or interests, devoting all the passion of their young lives to creatures who may exist only on the Internet. It will be appreciated by a handful of highly evolved film watchers who can generate a simultaneous analysis in their minds, but what is the point, really, in making a film that closes out most moviegoers? The world that swims murkily to the surface of "All About Lily Chou-Chou" is certainly a frightening one, eclipsing even the anomie of the Columbine killers. He has made a film that few reasonable ticket-buyers will have the patience to endure. Iwai seems to want to tell the story of his characters, and it could be a compelling one (some of the scenes have are poignant or wounding), but he cannot allow himself to make the film in a way that can communicate. It's a style that was interesting for a brief season and is now tiresome and pretentious.Įither you make an experimental film that cuts loose from narrative, characters and comprehensible cinematography, or you do not. Some sequences are so incomprehensible they play as complete abstractions. He and his cinematographer, Noboru Shinoda, are in love with their lightweight digital camera, and give us jerky hand-held out-of-focus shots.
Shiori has a secret crush on Yuichi, but is under Hoshino's control and pathetically confides on the telephone, "Lately, when I think of men I think of customers." The elements are in place for a powerful story of alienated Japanese teenagers, but the writer-director, Shunji Iwai, cannot bring himself to make the story accessible to ordinary audiences. Hoshino has another sideline: He pimps Shiori ( Yu Aoi) to prostitute herself with businessmen, and makes her give him most of the money. Both Yuichi and Yoko are the targets of cliques of school bullies.įor a while, Yuichi has a friend, Hoshino ( Shugo Oshinari), a fellow student who turns into a sadist and forces Yuichi to steal money and give it to him.
He has a crush on the real-life Yoko ( Ayumi Ito), a gifted pianist. Ironically, then, one of her songs consists of repetitions of "I see you and you see me." She is idolized by Yuichi ( Hayato Ichihara), a student in high school. The story: Lily Chou-Chou is a Japanese pop idol, who must be real, since she appears in concert, but who we never see.