If you do copy this plan and see this in a double bill with Submarine, make sure the happy one goes after, because Norwegian Wood is based on Haruki Murakami's novel about teenage anguish and suicide. Watanabe is a college student at a time of tumultuous student protests against the establishment. After his best friend Kizuki kills himself, a chance meeting with Kizuki's ex-girlfriend leads to a volatile relationship, and ultimately towards impending tragedy.
And golly, it is a miserable film. In that respect, it's kind of difficult to write about in the same way as it's hard to review good comedy. There's no amount of time that can make this kind of tragedy funny, and I saw in this one the kind of malaise and miserablism that many seemed to complain about in the actually very good Never Let Me Go. Where Kathy, Tommy and Ruth were programmed in their upbringing, there comes a point in this film where Watanabe almost seems programmed by the sheer amount of shit that weighs down upon him.
So as you can imagine, it's not an easy watch. It runs to 133 minutes long, and the miserablism almost becomes predictable over time. Certainly, the final 20 minutes or so seem distended in the wake of the inevitable scene that occurs before this denouement. Maybe the reason why Murakami is considered by his fans to be an unadaptable author is because the story on the page holds the kind of detail that doesn't usually translate to a visual medium. Then again, reading the blurb for the book suggests that there's still plenty of stuff cut from the film too.
And watching it also reminded me that there's an international difference in filmmaking that has nothing to do with subtitles. I see enough English language films to get a good grasp on the way they're constructed, but this one in particular seemed puzzling in the way it was edited. Although I learnt that the elbow is the least sensitive part of the body in one very short scene, I couldn't tell you why. I think part of why I stuck with it was because of the fine performance by Kenichi Matsuyama, whose Watanabe grows visibly more weary and aggrieved as events unfold. Likewise, Rinko Kikuchi, who was previously one of the few redeeming features of Babel, makes for a deeply mercurial and disturbed Naoko.
Norwegian Wood is now showing in selected cinemas nationwide.
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I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.