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Shunji Iwai's 2001 obsessive-fan drama All About Lily Chou-Chou blew my mind with its sheer boldness. Though at times it was derivative and unsubtle, scenes such as a boy listening to a Walkman in the middle of a field (in supersaturated digital video) or a horrific crime being captured on a handheld camcorder (in ultra-hazy DV) with a classical piano sonata in the background forced their way into my consciousness. Iwai's splashy emotionality, like that of Mayday lead singer and Iwai fanatic Ashin, commands attention.
Iwai's new light comedy, Hana & Alice, shares little with Lily Chou-Chou except the fascinating tones of DV and a fixation on the world of Japanese teenagers. It grew out of the idea of a series of vignettes of teenage life, and that shows as one charming scene after another adds up to a farfetched plot and an overlong movie. But that's not to minimize the charm along the way. The tone shifts from commonplace mystery, as when two girls follow two boys and decide they're brothers when one gently pulls the other back from the edge of a train platform, to sly satire, to teenage heartbreak. At 2 hours and 15 minutes, though shorter than Lily Chou-Chou, it came closer to throwing my back out than blowing my mind. But I'm glad I sat through it, if only for the fine lead performances and the hilarious visual and verbal one-liners along the way. With a pop discipline closer to that of four-minute-single master Ashin, Iwai may yet create a masterpiece that doesn't require so much indulgence on the audience's part.