Whispers in the Ether: All About Lily Chou-Chou

June 07, 2023

Let me get the positives out of the way quickly. I found the cinematography to be stunning, I loved the music and the way it was used in conjunction with the plot, and I enjoyed the use of superimposing text on the screen for the website everyone was using.

That being said, I'm really struggling with the tone of the movie by the end. I tried doing a bit of research after finishing the film, and I'm starting to feel like maybe I am the only one who feels this way. I get that the movie was about these fucked-up youths who all managed to keep their head above the water through the music of Lily Chou-Chou, and I think it did pull those things off. I think it worked for the numerous beatings, forced public masturbation, blackmailed prostitution, forced naked mud swimming, etc. The thing that has been bothering me is that I feel the telling people to rape, the people actually raping, and the filming of the raping of Kuno to be on a different level of fucked up. I despised Hoshino and his crew for this. The tone for the ending of the film made it seem like all of the main characters were victims of this awful situation and as a result, have been living awful lives themselves, and their way of coping was through music. They keep going back to the shot of Hoshino alone in the field with his headphones, screaming his head off because life was so awful. But I didn't feel an ounce of sympathy for him after what happened with Kuno. And I wouldn't have an issue if I was meant to dislike his character, but because the ending is about all of them having shitty lives and banding together through music, I felt they were putting Hoshino on equal footing as the rest. Like he was just as much a victim of this and should be equally sympathized with.

Maybe I'm missing something or maybe I'm misinterpreting something. I would love to hear other people's views on this movie. I thought it was a spectacular film this part aside, I just can't shake the residual feeling of Hoshino being just as victimized as Yuichi or Tsuda when he was a main cause of the worst shit that happened. I'll probably need to rewatch it.

Side note: I get that Kuno shaving her head was a form of telling Hoshino fuck you, because you have to assume the video of the rape would be used to blackmail her into prostitution. But just like when Tsuda remarked "Do you think he'd still use me if I got fat?", she made herself "unappealing" as a form of taking control of the situation.