Culture

Director: Anh Hung Tran (3.5/5)

Sometimes books should stay as books. Nothing undermines an original more than a failed attempt at a movie. But Norwegian Wood really does achieve the enthralling and damaging sense of the classic 1987 novel by Haruki Murakami.
 
It is Tokyo in the Sixties and students around the world are uniting against the establishment. Toru Watanabe’s love life is similarly in tumult. Set in a time of revolutionary upheaval, this is a heart-breaking story of young love and death in a time of global instability. However, Anh Hung Tran doesn’t dwell on context for long; he dives into a dark ecstasy of despair concerning moral and philosophical questions. He asks, and we thus ask ourselves, what’s the point in love and commitment when death can cruelly remove them at any moment? How can we be sure of the meaning of our feelings when we cannot ever fully understand each other? You get the drift.
 
At heart, Wantanabe is deeply devoted to his first love, Naoko who was in fact his best friend’s girlfriend through childhood. The tragic suicide of the friend binds them together a few years down the track, almost smothering them with the overwhelming pain they share. While Wantanabe begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable and is admitted to a psychiatric facility. Over time he begins to struggle with the dilemma as to whether his love is true or stems from a need to save Naoko from her emotional distress, and while this drags out, Midori - the fiercely independent and sex-savvy girl on campus - marches into his life, forcing him to choose between his past and future.
 
Visually the film is stunning, the colours are soft, and the atmosphere perfect. Teamed with superb acting, it’s a recipe for success. It is hard at times to identity with some of the characters, burdened, as they are with constant self-reflection, but it is a film that lingers hauntingly in the mind, and despite its depth I found it refreshing and would highly recommend to any adult audience.