I have never seen for example a film present death so invisibly, so poetically. Just one lush dynamic sweep of a calligrapher's brush that paints people and worlds as they come into being and vanish again. That is fine but what this film does is even more difficult to accomplish. There are no intricate mechanisms to structure life. So this is where it goes deeper than say, a new Malick film. Mournful beauty about what it means 'to read the love letters sent by the moon, wind, and snow', to quote an old Buddhist poem. Calligraphic flows to and from interior heart. This is as Zen as possible and in the most pure sense of the term. In other words: if the old Zen Masters were alive now, all of them exceptional poets or landscape painters in their day and with a great sense of humor, they would all be New Wave filmmakers. So every rejection of tradition that we find in those films, or this one now, only serves to re-discover what was so vital and groundbreaking about Japanese tradition in the first place. But as with Oshima and the rest back in the 60's, what these guys perhaps don't know is that French film that seemed so radical and appealing to the Japanese at the time and was presumed to have re-invented cinematic grammar, it was built on precisely what the Japanese had first revolutionized about representation in the 18th and 19th century. Typical for New Wave, the world is distinctly modern and vibrant. Now we're lucky this is Japanese, and even perhaps unconsciously so. We presume we'll get to know the people behind the nicknames and identify them as one of several youths whose lives we intimately follow in its petty cockiness and idle pleasure, or even worse that they don't matter at all and this is purely ornamental. Now and then conversations are enacted in some unspecified blogosphere: this is given to us as disembodied words against a black screen. This is woven together with a thread about music, revolving around a band named Lily Chou-Chou that is all the rage among youth. The story is about teenage high school students: cliques and counter-cliques and much tension and drama inbetween them as they discover love and power. This is the New New Wave: even more visual episodic movements through edges of life, even more radical dislocations from the ordinary world of narrative. The fulcrum of that film unraveled from this notion: if you peel a cabbage you get its core, but if you peel an onion? (this is really worth puzzling over btw, in a Zen way, and the film worth seeking out.) The answer to that very much pertains here. In 1968, there was a film made in Japan called Nanami: Inferno of First Love, also Japanese New Wave about confused, apprehensive youth feeling the first pulls to join the fray of existence: love, pain, loss, all the adult stuff they used to know as words. This little obscurity: lyrical breath and pulse from life. The many times Oscar nominated film: airbrushed beauty mistaken for purity. I was perhaps lucky to have seen a Hollywood film a few days prior, Alexander Payne's latest and supposedly also about a spiritual journey of sorts and passing for an 'indie'.