Once there, Hoshino has a traumatic near-death experience and his personality changes from good-natured to dangerous and manipulative. The kendo club summer camp training is tough, and Hoshino, Hasumi and some other first-grade boys decide to take a trip to Okinawa. Hasumi mistakes Hoshino's attractive young mother for his sister. Hoshino's family is wealthy in comparison to Hasumi's family. Hoshino and Hasumi meet and become friends when they join the kendo club, and Hoshino invites Hasumi to stay over at his house.
In elementary school, Hoshino was one of the best students in school, but was picked on by his classmates. The film has a discontinuous storyline, starting midway through the story, just after the second term of junior high school begins, then flashes back to the first term and summer vacation, and then skips back to the present. For the successful integration of sex scenes in the storyline, Gry Bay's portrayal of Anna, and the excellent DVD release, I give All About Anna 8 stars.All About Lily Chou-Chou follows two boys, Shuusuke Hoshino and Yuichi Hasumi, from the start of junior high school when they first meet, and into second grade. I suppose that this film would appeal to a female audience, aged between say 18 and 38, who are able to identify with Gry Bay's portrayal of Anna, a young female looking for her one and only love. As an extra bonus the distributor has added a third disc promoting pornographic films which gives further evidence to the stark contrast between All About Anna and the standard, more mechanical pornographic film. The DVD release is impeccable with several audio commentaries on different aspects of the production, a documentary on The Love-Making of All About Anna, trailers, unedited sequences, and even a director's original edit. Despite the shortcoming of the production, I think the film successfully integrates the sex scenes into the storyline and character development. the sex scenes appear to have been originally intended to be longer and somewhat more explicit than in the final edit. Unfortunately, the film, and particularly the cinematography, is a bit uneven, and it is obvious from the copious extra material on the DVD release that some of the original intentions had to be scrapped in order to make the final film. The storyline is told in episodes, an approach that works very well and obviously could allow for expanding with more episodes in the life of this young female.
Her audio commentary is very revealing on how different All About Anna is from standard pornographic films.
However, it is Ovidie who contributes one of the trumps of the DVD release. Supporting actress, Eileen Daly, adds both comedy and tragedy to her scenes, while French porn actress Ovidie is passable as a French actress who shows Anna around Paris and has a sexual encounter with her. The leading actress, Gry Bay, in particular contributes a sensitivity to the sex scenes that is unlike what you would expect in a film with pornographic content, and gives a good portrayal of the young female single who longs for her one and only great love and tries to cope with her career, room mate and boyfriend. In fact, the sex scenes even play with or against the conventions customary to pornographic films, and are also used to portray the personalities of the characters. Consequently the sex scenes are photographed and performed in a way that you would not expect in a typical hardcore pornographic film. This normalization of the pornographic content is further emphasized by the fact that most of the crew and actors had no experience with making pornographic films before All About Anna. All About Anna aims to be an erotic film for and by women that incorporates unsimulated sex scenes as a natural part of the storyline.