Norwegian Wood (2011) directed by Anh Hung Tran from Japan

It's always a tricky thing plunging into a movie adaptation of a book you've read, even more so when it's a book you're intimately familiar with by one of your favorite authors. Should I contrast and compare? Should I nitpick? Did it evoke the same kind of mood and fully represent the ideas of the book? Does it matter? In the end I suppose as a devoted reader of Haruki Murakami it does matter to me, but as a fan of movies I've found it easy to divorce myself from expectations and just take it as a different version of the same story...much like a movie remake in a way. That being said I can't help but make comparisons if I feel the movie suffered from its exclusion.

The story itself is a rather simple tale of Toru Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) a man looking back as his youth in the late '60s in which the tragic death of a close friend draws him into a relationship with his emotionally fragile girlfriend Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi) whom he eventually falls deeply in love with even as she emotionally begins to unravel and become withdrawn. During his back and forth with Naoko, Toru eventually begins to casually hang out with and eventually date the lively and vivacious Midori (Kiko Mizuhara) whose lust for life is attractive to Toru even though her tendency to play those typical youthful control issue games gives him some pause. Though on paper the plot looks to be set up as a love triangle, the characters are all kept fairly distant from each other so the sole focus really becomes about three very different people with very different needs and desires and if they can somehow learn to grow to accept each other and indeed learn what exactly it is that they want from life.

Tran's adaptation of Haruki Murakami's breakout novel 'Norwegian Wood' certainly is a moody affair which strives to convey a lot of subtext into its gorgeous and haunting photography hoping to infuse them with as much unsaid information as possible to make up for the lack of the book's constant first person narrative. For the most part Tran's sumptuous natural settings and tightly shot character interactions go a long way to successfully convey the intensity of the prevailing emotion or to betray the true feelings or nature of their character as every inflection is closely scrutinized. But though it's indeed a poetically charged film the characters, most notably the lead Toru Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama), seem to be a bit too distant and kept emotionally too far at bay for the viewer to really become involved with their characters. Toru's particular problem with equating sexual interaction with emotional love while misunderstanding that others might not feel this way seems too muted and as a result his character lacks much of an emotional edge that the other character possess due to either their actions or dialogue specifically dealing with their issues.

But even with these issues in the end the film did succeed in emotionally pulling me into the characters even if the main protagonist is weakly presented. It's a flawed film, but a poetically gorgeous one that tries to convey a lot with what is left unsaid even though it takes quite a long time to do so.