Fell in Love with a Girl; All About Lily Chou-Chou
To depict the jittery, buzzing energy of the White Stripes' single "Fell in Love with a Girl," Gondry goes for pure evocation of mood and temperament. All About Lily Chou-Chou, however, is archly contrived, like Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep, positing a small world of alienated pop savants modeled after a cultural totem?in this case a Bjork-like pop singer named Lily Chou-Chou, who is worshiped by lonely Japanese teens who express their idolatry (and isolation) on websites. (Not coincidentally, Iwai's film follows the mix of political dissatisfaction and pop-song irony in Fassbinder's Lili Marleen; in fact the syllables of Lily Chou-Chou fall together in the same rhythmic pattern.)
Because the West often looks to Japanese pop to play back and translate the new styles we take for granted, All About Lily Chou-Chou has been regarded as a serious expression of how today's youth sees the world. But when eighth-grader Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) leaves his computer for school, gangs and girls on a pilgrimage to a Lily Chou-Chou concert (and thus, a confrontation with the world), the issues that arise?youth's rejection of tradition, peer-group mentality, infatuation with glamour and naive susceptibility to exploitation?are the proverbial teen themes. Iwai doesn't demonstrate any new insight. The chat-room messages and new-techno artifacts only distract awareness that Iwai's Kewl Story of Youth has less depth than Nagisa Oshima's more daring and prescient 1960 Cruel Story of Youth.
Iwai's coup was to shoot Yuichi's alienation in high-definition video so that its teen cliches look like they emanated from the zeitgeist. This is, admittedly, a superlative hi-def product. Iwai shows off genuine visual imagination?a violet nude in shallow brown water, green-lit bicycling at night, a purple-shadowed figure in a golden field. It's all lovely, it makes recent stuff from InDigEnt look indigent, but the images are fluff. Such effects as water splashes refracted on the lens have a spell-binding immediacy. Scenes of Yuichi in martial arts class glow with the haze of new-dawning puissance?Yuichi's own self-consciousness. Still, it's not good enough, because Iwai's pictorial narrative is too literal-minded. (I counted one poetic touch?when a girl grinds money into dirt with her shoe.) There are no ellipses or allusions, just an unblinking documentation of whatever's before the camera made even more enervating by streams of Internet typography?chat-room conversations between "philia" and "blue cat"?that serve as redundant narration. Clearly the ease and capacity of video (and the drift of cyberspace) have cost Iwai a sense of time and proportion. Two and a half hours! His style is not filmmaking but taping.
Iwai acquiesces to fashion more than he enlightens teens' modern viewpoint. Yuichi's adoration of Lily Chou-Chou turns into antisocial shoplifting. There's even a Blair Witch shaky-cam rape scene that occurs as part of the sexual humiliation Yuichi and a girl, Yoko (Ayumi Ito), receive from schoolmates. An adult Yuichi encounters talks about a ficus tree that strangles other trees: "If you shot that in time-lapse it'd be horrifying, huh?" He mediates nature as affectlessly as one classmates asserts, "The world did end. The world we live in now is The Matrix!" and another describes rice fields as being "sterile green." The latter suggests Iwai himself doesn't seem to see nature. This hi-def world is even more abstracted than the rotoscope animation in Waking Life. Iwai accepts moral drift and syncretizes it with pop technology, forcing one to ask the key question of the digital age: "Can a myopic generation produce movie art?"
Perhaps All About Lily Chou-Chou is true to the way Y2K youth sees the world, but if they've never seen Lawrence of Arabia or A Place in the Sun or Cries and Whispers or McCabe & Mrs. Miller?modern cinema's visual landmarks?how can their art connect to the world and to humanity? Digital video deceives them by offering a "new" way of seeing and thinking about the world that is uninformed and unnuanced. It may be their own perspective, but it's stunted, a misperception. Digital video, like Lily Chou-Chou's music, is Debussy-lite, a muzak simulacrum. Iwai's style affects modernity without discovering new images. Roman Coppola got it all right in CQ, but many critics were unmoved by his classicism (i.e., his old-fashioned love of film qua film). All About Lily Chou-Chou enshrines this perceptual regression in the guise of a generational lament. The first digital video feature I've seen with an appreciable visual quality, it in fact recalls what museum video installations originally looked like. You could walk away from those?and often did.
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Bjork's music videos are better than Iwai's Lily Chou-Chou clips because Bjork's best benefited from Michel Gondry's ingenuity. Gondry's visual wit didn't keep his feature debut Human Nature from seeming too clever (Being John Malkovich scenarist Charlie Kaufman overwrote his own brilliance), but in the short music-video format, Gondry's ideas are perfectly conceptualized. I'm featuring Gondry's much-discussed but little seen Fell in Love with a Girl as part of the "Video Revolution" program at the Lincoln Center Video Festival partly to demonstrate the change in esthetics that All About Lily Chou-Chou romanticizes without articulating.
Gondry's tough, short film complements the song it accompanies, yet it playfully recognizes the dissolution and displacement of visual esthetics that the upcoming digital video revolution will soon make commonplace. The joke of Fell in Love with a Girl is that it's actually shot on film. Gondry simulates the breakdown of imagery?of life?into pixels. Every image resembles Lego blocks. The almost pointillistic effect hits home as a parody of people and things seen too closeup; it's what happens when film's smooth visual resolution is replaced by video bits. The intent is new and playful, but what results is serious distortion.
"First I shot the basic rock video with a little video camera," Gondry told Boardsmag.com. While editing, Gondry put the negative through a computer program to make low-resolution print-outs that resembled Lego-like, pixel-like shapes. Next, Gondry assembled each image using Legos and shooting with a 16 mm Bolex for the stop-motion animation. A larger number of Legos were used to give high resolution to the closeups of the band's faces. "I thought the crudeness of Lego would represent them well. Animation for punk should be handmade." His point is not simply to record what the White Stripes members look like, but to pump their images with bright, Mondrian colors?not sterile videography, but colors bearing the fingerprints of pleasure, fun.
It's Gondry's cheerful style in Fell in Love with a Girl that makes the song's proverbial topic seem new. He proves Andre Bazin's description of the cinema revolution: "The photograph allows us...to admire in reproduction something that our eyes alone could not have taught us to love." That's better than Iwai's d-v facetiousness.