Norwegian Wood | Film review

A helpful tip for young lovers: After deflowering your dead buddy’s high-school sweetheart, asking her why the two of them never slept together might not be the ideal pillow talk. That, alas, is the lamebrain, postcoital conversation-starter Toru (Ken’ichi Matsuyama) tries out on Naoko (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi), with predictably mood-dampening results. These fledgling romantics are coming of age in the shell-shocked aftermath of her ex-beau’s suicide. Following their ill-fated hookup, Naoko jets off to a secluded mountain asylum for some extended R & R. Toru blunders after her, though not before taking lady-killer lessons from a local playboy and toying with the heart of a smitten university classmate.

Set in the late ’60s, Norwegian Wood is based on a popular 1987 page-turner by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. One gets the distinct impression that a novel’s worth of insight—into love, loss and a changing cultural climate—has been dramatically truncated in the transition. The film’s characters are so chronically unhappy, so burdened with grief and sexual dysfunction, that their passage into adulthood scans more as a symbolic lament for a lost generation than an authentic depiction of growing up. Thank God, then, for the aesthetic pleasures. French-Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hùng (The Scent of Green Papaya) floods the soundtrack with new compositions from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, immerses us in unfussy period detail and captures all the post-adolescent angst in elegant, unbroken tracking shots from cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin. These damaged sad sacks may be devoid of youthful energy, but Tran has it in spades.