Movie : Norwegian Wood, or: How a director's ego plagues an otherwise touching adaptation
Link : Norwegian Wood, or: How a director's ego plagues an otherwise touching adaptation
Norwegian Wood, or: How a director's ego plagues an otherwise touching adaptation
Norwegian Wood (2010)
Directed by Anh Hung Tran
Directed by Anh Hung Tran
***SPOILERS***
I would like to berate Norwegian Wood for the incredibly lame tidbits Toru (Ken’ichi Matsuyama) reads from his journal, but I feel as though it’d be like picking apart the immaturely racist and sexist comments flooding throughout Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Much like those wildly outspoken teens, Toru’s callowness causes him to view certain situations in a slightly more romantic light than forgivable. “Life stopped and became empty like the very pages before my eyes.” Dude. “Finally I returned to myself.” Yes, I can see that…the only thing that inhibits the emotional power behind his complete and utter breakdown after Naoko’s (Rinko Kikuchi) death from seeming too bombastic is the scene where Toru prematurely blows his load in under a minute. With all the self-pitying, emo-rific suicidal undertones (and overtones), at its heart, Norwegian Wood is a tale about a boy who has no idea what love is. He’s far too self-absorbed and nostalgic to realize that, dude, come on, Midori (Kiko Mizuhara) ain’t waitin’ around forever. Finally putting away the past, Toru is able to move on and realize this at the expense of a few treacherous years that helped him break from his callow shell. Dealing with the pressures and insecurities of sex, a disconnected political movement and losing someone dearly close to you, we feel Toru growing up before our very eyes. The ending is a nice rounding out for the story, remaining ambiguous and unclear, but hopeful all the same.
And guess what? I know all of this with no help from the filmmakers themselves. Director and screenwriter Anh Hung Tran skims over Haruki Murakami’s novel, presenting the important moments and transitions, but never breathing life into the story. Tran aptly relates the proper mood for any given scene, with immense help from Johnny Greenwood’s grandiloquent score, but what’s a feeling without somebody to feel for? I’m not of the belief we need to take a long and uncompromising journey with all the characters involved to relate to them, but constantly relating the mood of a situation without addressing the characters involved is a sad case of style over substance. Unfortunately, Tran’s style is so lushly inconsistent and self-contradicting that we’re forced to endure elaborately dull sequences filtered through blank characters regurgitating lines from Murakami’s famed novel.
If my life depended on it, I still couldn’t explain the randomness of Tran’s shot selection. Along with Toru’s many different personalities, the film itself has no identity. Except for Tran, this isn’t admirable, relatable or compelling in the slightest. Tran may be separating himself from other directors through his experimental style, but not in the way he'd hope. Watch any Paul Thomas Anderson or Terrence Malick film, and you’ll rarely find a wasted close up or long shot. Hell, even the jumpy Darren Aronofsky has a purpose with each crazy ass shot. Shifts in tone are usually dictated by Greenwood’s score, while Tran’s camerawork feels the opposite. He moves too close and hovers too far away with the same eagerness, constantly trying to make himself noticeable when more interesting things are happening. During a conversation between Toru and Midori, Tran slowly zooms in on the boy, and then immediately shifts to a contradicting horizontal pan of the girl. This conversation follows a tracking shot of the pair walking around Midori’s apartment, with the jump cuts more distracting than conversation itself. Toru takes a walk with Naoko, smiling and reminiscing, and then Tran suddenly employs a first-person view for Toru, looking at Naoko. So, like...I'm Toru? What the fuck, man...
Tran isn’t even trying to dictate a mood or convey a feeling in these scenes, but rather insert himself whenever possible. He even tampers with the film’s best moment, providing a canted angle during Toru and Naoko’s first sex scene, getting too close for comfort—which actually works. But even though Tran’s shot is effective, the real beauty lies within the silence and abruptness of the moment. The heavy breathing surrounds the viewer, bringing us in for an awkward encounter between two teenagers relishing in a nostalgic and bittersweet moment. It’s during these quieter moments we learn the most about our characters, when they’re allowed room to breath and flush out.
We see Tran screwing up with the camera, but his script is equally inept. Once again, instead of focusing on compelling dialogue, he feels the need to film the important bits of the story, but spend no time connecting them. Random musical montages are used as transitions, transporting the character from one mood or girl to the next. And once those conversations occur, Tran tells us what we want to know through narration instead of letting those indicators come through the characters. “We didn’t talk about the past,” says Toru, relating the nature of his and Naoko’s relationship. Why say that? Why not show me that? Make me feel that? Because it’s a direct quote from the book, which ain’t a good reason. The opening scene features Toru and Kizuki facing off with pens as though they were swords, indicating the Toru’s future grapple over his infatuation with Naoko. This is gripping and it tells me something I haven't realized yet, but it’s immediately ruined with Toru’s narration, indicating where the story is heading instead of allowing us to bask in the melancholy. For such an emo film, shouldn't it want us to experience that? This is just the first taste—that damn journal will continue to narrate the rest of the film, telling us what we should see and never allowing us to become part of the film.
There are many great moments in this film. Despite the lazy buildup, Greenwood’s grueling score set alongside Toru’s depressive state is incredibly powerful. As Toru keeps his distance while walking with Naoko and walks closely with Midori, I see the dynamics between their relationships more clearly than any random shot or forced narration could ever hope to relate. People enter and exit Toru’s life before he can understand them, which only leads to more self-reflection and depression. But these moments are few and far between. What do I learn about these characters with haphazard montages and narrations? Instead of focusing on humane moments that capture the character’s personalities, Tran is too busy working with an outline. He has several points he wants to hit on from the source novel, but wants to do none of the work required to make the story relatable. So when Turo lies on the beach, sobbing and wailing for Naoko, I feel the emotion, but I can’t help but feel cheated. The story is coherent, but it’s also manufactured and void of compelling character development. Tran may have translated Murakami’s book to a film, but he didn’t translate what he wrote.
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