But Iwai's aesthete delicacy sometimes lets you overlook just how disturbing an essay this is on Japanese school rituals. At bottom, Lily Chou Chou is intimate realism, given uplift by a lyrical style that is sometimes over-precious, sometimes magnificent. Such moments show an ambitious sense of scale that gives Iwai's film a scope far bigger than his ostensible subject: the result could easily have been a crueller, trendier Grange Hill. Not surprisingly, the real action at her concert is in the crowd outside: the climax echoes the Hollywood street apocalypse in Nathaniel West's novel The Day of the Locust. It's only towards the end, when she plays live, that real and imaginary worlds collide, to cataclysmic effect.
In the film, Lily's domain figures as a separate, parallel zone offering her fans refuge from everyday misery.
Before he wrote the film, director Shunji Iwai created a Lily website: presumably, some of the bulletin-board comments we read are from people who gamely played along with his fantasy. The figure of Lily was loosely inspired by Asian pop star Faye Wong, the gamine trouble-maker in Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express. Despite initial fears of a flashy Matrix–style number, as digits whiz before our eyes, the film is unusually level-headed about the internet as nothing more fancy than a place where scraps of text flash up on a screen. A traumatised Yuichi retreats into the Lilyverse, where he presides as website manager "Philia" and forms a tender bond with another fan, "Blue Cat" (no surprises when we finally discover who that is). He pimps one girl to middle-aged salarymen and endorses the general victimisation of another, Debussy-loving pianist Yoko Kuno (Ayumi Ito). Hoshino challenges and supplants the class bully, and turns thoroughly rotten: mooching around in hooded tops is just the start of it.
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