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13 Apr 2011

Norwegian Wood

With a little help from his friend, a director adapts a unfilmable novel.

Original Title: ノルウェイの森

Rating: M18 (Some Sexual Content)

Director: Tran Anh Hung

Screenplay: Tran Anh Hung, Haruki Murakami; based on a novel by Haruki Murakami

Cast: Kenichi Matsuyama, Rinko Kikuchi, Kiko Mizuhara, Tetsuji Tamayama, Reika Kirishima

Release: 14 April 2011

Picturehouse selection

The past decade has not been kind to Tran Anh Hung. The arthouse director with a strong visual style had a smoking start at Cannes and Paris in the 1990s with The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo but as far as fans and critics are concerned, that was his peak. Tran continues his attempt at a comeback by attempting the impossible (or the ill-advised) – an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. This attempt is as heroically foolhardy as it is almost certainly doomed – the adage these days is that you can’t make good film adaptations of great novels. But with Haruki Murakami helping out the director with the screenplay (modestly, the novelist’s contribution as script doctor is downplayed in the film credits), will this curse be averted?

There are a few things working against the film right from the start, the chief problem being the original novel itself. Consisting largely of stream of consciousness interior monologues, the novel also covers too unwieldy a sprawl of topics for a film adaptation. For much of the first act, audiences familiar with the source material will wonder what exactly Tran will cut out from this adaptation, and whether the film characters can transcend their original concept as novelistic characters whose thought processes – rather than speech and actions – provide the narrative’s dramatic momentum. Audiences unfamiliar with the source material may even mistake the film for a work of a lesser arthouse director.

Norwegian Wood takes a while to make up its mind but it when it does so, the film works out brilliantly as a coming of age story where various characters come to terms with their developing sexuality. Murakami here pares down Tran’s script, whittling its cast of characters to just five – two love triangles (one heterosexual, one homosocial) that illustrate an almost Platonic principle that those whose bodies we desire, those whose company we enjoy, and those whose presence we can live with are categories that rarely coincide. The human attempt to unite these divisions propels much of the frantic pursuit of love.

It is clear that Tran’s touch for visual beauty in film has not lessened in his ‘missing decade’, and that Murakami’s rescue job on the original screenplay was very much needed and not at times not sufficiently drastic enough. The ensemble cast, headed by Kenichi Matsuyama (Death Note), perform with virtuosity from an imperfect script. The result is an adaptation that can almost stand on its own right as a work of art.

读者回应

1. 2011-04-13 16:44  
2. 2011-04-13 20:53  
no doubt that norwegion wood is my favorite book and im eager to watch! pretty curious how midori will turn out in real life
3. 2011-04-13 21:28  
Very interesting review. Norwegian Wood was one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen but strangely unmoving, maybe because when the subject is teenagers' love problems rather than people with a bit more maturity, it is easy to assume they'll get over it pretty fast and find someone else!
4. 2011-04-16 09:54  
with each relationship failure going unresolved piling up one on to each other leads to the emotional distress that eventually cripples 'mature' people, from continual emotional exhaustion and disappointment comes substance abuse co-dependancy and violence, best to show empathy and be moved by young peoples experiences, resource them in dealing with eventual emotional distress that comes with many relationship experiments and encourage them into developing better life skills and making better chooices in partners rather than just see relationship hopping as the answer no wonder there is so many older single dysfunctional slutty gay people if this is the best we can offer
修改於2011-04-16 09:57:14
5. 2011-04-18 17:17  
When you're young you fall in and out of love more easily and quickly than when you're older, which is perfectly natural and the film showed it brilliantly. I was expecting to be in floods of tears throughout, various reviews had told me I would be. Instead I greatly admired the film, but didn't shead a tear. I wondered why this was and came to the conclusion that if the film had been about fourtysomethings trying to make relationships work I might have been!
6. 2011-04-19 03:35  
two different languages, one doesn't have to be a literal translation of the other
7. 2011-04-29 14:39  
Youve got me wanting to read the book AND see the film now. Great comments from the contributors, although astlan (#4), a few full-stops might have helped. I loved 'Green Papaya'; the sensuousness of the cooking food was as good as Ang Lee's 'Eat Drink Man Woman'; Cyclo was a bit too visceral for my taste, although very watchable.

I saw an interview (subtitled from French) with Director Tran when Cyclo was released; not only is he good looking and articulate, but his Vietnamese-accented French made me go completely weak at the knees...

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