Given that this is out on DVD and Blu Ray today, (I got my copy early)I thought I'd repost my review from when I saw it at the cinema.
Ok, so I saw this yesterday afternoon.
Norwegian Wood Dir. Tran Ahn Hung
*** out of *****
first of all, this film looks beautiful. The cinematography is great, the scenery lush, the locations wonderful.
The acting was excellent too, lots of subtlety and restrained feeling.
***********SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT******************
However, the film itself for the first half at least, is a horrible car-crash of random scenes shoved together with no thought to exposition, continuity or explanation. The director races through the first third of the book, seemingly picking events at random and chucking them at the screen, utterly eviscerating any sense of atmosphere or building of character. Watanabe's roommate is shown twice for a total of about 5 seconds before disappearing altogether with no explanation. Nagasawa appears and disappears without reason or furtherance of the plot.
One of the pivotal scenes of the book, where Toru spends time with Midori's father is reduced to a man laying in a hospital bed for 10 seconds. All sacrificed for some extended scenes of people looking wistful.
Having read the book 3 or 4 times, I was still left struggling to keep up with what was going on. Anyone who hasn't read the book would be totally baffled, I think. And not in a good, way - it provokes no desire to stay with it, just a feeling of violent disorientation, that stands foursquare in opposition to the themes and atmosphere of the book. If this is a deliberate aim of the the filmmaker, it's woefully misguided.
The music, while beautiful is often too histrionic, telegraphing scenes of heightened emotion like a British war film from the 40's or 50's.
I wonder how much of this is down to the different cinematic shortcuts there are in Vietnamese and Japanese film-making, how much due to Tran Ahn Hung's style (I've not seen the Scent of Green Papayas, his major film) and how much is just down to trying to squeeze a 500 page book into 2 hours.
And yet, and yet...
In the second half, the film flowers, opens out into what it should always have been. The soft, sad disaffected feeling, the sense of increasing desperation and enduring love are there in full, utterly capturing the spirit of the story. And it only slips into melodrama very briefly, which makes it a cut above most Hollywood films about the subject of impossible love. The parallel stories of Toru and Naoko and Toru and Midori, one representing life and hope the other death and despair are beautifully handled, moving between the teo seemlessly.
The scenes with Hatsumi, sadly truncated are beautifully acted - the actress bringing all the resigned acceptance and age beyond years caused by her helpless love for the unpleasant and nihilistic Nagasawa.
So in all, a difficult film. One that will probably leave people who haven't read the book utterly alienated. It also mainly fails to deliver to fans of the story too, focussing on all the wrong things in the first half to the detriment of the overall picture.
But it DID ultimately manage to leave me with the same feeling the book gives me and to that end I have to see it as at least partly successful. The story of Toru, Naoko and Midori is one of an overall atmosphere an overall sense of loss and redemption rather than a strict procession of occurrences. And ultimately, despite it's disjointed first half, it's an atmosphere the film manages to capture.
Norwegian Wood Dir. Tran Ahn Hung
*** out of *****
first of all, this film looks beautiful. The cinematography is great, the scenery lush, the locations wonderful.
The acting was excellent too, lots of subtlety and restrained feeling.
***********SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT******************
However, the film itself for the first half at least, is a horrible car-crash of random scenes shoved together with no thought to exposition, continuity or explanation. The director races through the first third of the book, seemingly picking events at random and chucking them at the screen, utterly eviscerating any sense of atmosphere or building of character. Watanabe's roommate is shown twice for a total of about 5 seconds before disappearing altogether with no explanation. Nagasawa appears and disappears without reason or furtherance of the plot.
One of the pivotal scenes of the book, where Toru spends time with Midori's father is reduced to a man laying in a hospital bed for 10 seconds. All sacrificed for some extended scenes of people looking wistful.
Having read the book 3 or 4 times, I was still left struggling to keep up with what was going on. Anyone who hasn't read the book would be totally baffled, I think. And not in a good, way - it provokes no desire to stay with it, just a feeling of violent disorientation, that stands foursquare in opposition to the themes and atmosphere of the book. If this is a deliberate aim of the the filmmaker, it's woefully misguided.
The music, while beautiful is often too histrionic, telegraphing scenes of heightened emotion like a British war film from the 40's or 50's.
I wonder how much of this is down to the different cinematic shortcuts there are in Vietnamese and Japanese film-making, how much due to Tran Ahn Hung's style (I've not seen the Scent of Green Papayas, his major film) and how much is just down to trying to squeeze a 500 page book into 2 hours.
And yet, and yet...
In the second half, the film flowers, opens out into what it should always have been. The soft, sad disaffected feeling, the sense of increasing desperation and enduring love are there in full, utterly capturing the spirit of the story. And it only slips into melodrama very briefly, which makes it a cut above most Hollywood films about the subject of impossible love. The parallel stories of Toru and Naoko and Toru and Midori, one representing life and hope the other death and despair are beautifully handled, moving between the teo seemlessly.
The scenes with Hatsumi, sadly truncated are beautifully acted - the actress bringing all the resigned acceptance and age beyond years caused by her helpless love for the unpleasant and nihilistic Nagasawa.
So in all, a difficult film. One that will probably leave people who haven't read the book utterly alienated. It also mainly fails to deliver to fans of the story too, focussing on all the wrong things in the first half to the detriment of the overall picture.
But it DID ultimately manage to leave me with the same feeling the book gives me and to that end I have to see it as at least partly successful. The story of Toru, Naoko and Midori is one of an overall atmosphere an overall sense of loss and redemption rather than a strict procession of occurrences. And ultimately, despite it's disjointed first half, it's an atmosphere the film manages to capture.
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