FILM: NORWEGIAN WOOD – SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL SERIES – FREELANCE CRITIC MARTIN SIMPSON
Review By Martin Simpson
Director: Anh Hung Tran
Cast: Rinko Kikuchi Ken’ichi Matsuyama Kiko Mizuhara
Synopsis: Upon hearing the song “Norwegian Wood,” Toru (Matsuyama) remembers back to his life in the 1960s, when his friend Kizuki killed himself and he grew close to Naoko, Kizuki’s girlfriend. As the two try, in very different ways, to contend with their grief, Toru forms a bond with another woman, Midori.
Review: Haruki Murakami’s novel begins in Proustian style with a forty year old man on a 747 who, on hearing the Beatles song of the title, is transported in memory back to his troubled youth of 1967. Less interestingly, the film starts straight into his youth with a voice-over narration, and so the person beside me in the cinema never realised the story was about youth filtered through the lens of experience. In the film the melancholic backward gaze at an unalterable past was confusable for a present narrative, so the passivity of the central character took on a duller meaning.
I was bored for the first part of this glacially paced film.
An inscrutable young man flirts and dates at university with little obvious emotional connection to the women in his life. His rival in love suicides for unclear reasons. His handsome and amoral hostel room-mate lives a parallel existence while slowly destroying the only woman who truly cares for him.
But then, when the action moved outside Tokyo to a windswept landscape of damp grass and empty hills, and the woman he is falling in love with began her decline, an extraordinary thing happened to me. I fell into a trance. The long camera-takes in the wide landscape carried me deeper and deeper into the magic world of young love and fumbling passion at its most disturbing. The beauty of wind and snow and trees and grass began to weave a spell that took me too back to a yesterday when love changed from an easy game to play to something far more confusing and painful. Answers to tantalizing questions of eros and death became emotionally clearer and more moving. At the abrupt end, after more than two hours in that world, as I sat in the theatre and came to my senses, I felt something deep and real had been experienced.
This is cinema.
PRIMATE’S PERSPECTIVE: Primate was said person next to Martin in the cinema. It would have been nice to be made aware that this was a story of reflection as Martin noted. The cinematography was excellent in rural Tokyo. The acting was stilted for the most part though the musical score was well handled when there was music, as much of the film played out in awkward deafening silence. This is a ponderous film indeed. It didn’t sit comfortably with this reviewer but it was certainly an experience.
And yes, the music was excellent. Some pieces were Beatlesque songs that evoked the period, like the polyester shirts and jackets; some pieces were orchestral primal screams, as visceral as Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock scores, though they ached rather than stabbed.