Norwegian Wood

Synopsis: Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) hears the song “Norwegian Wood,” which takes him back twenty years earlier to 1969. Unable to cope with the suicide of his best friend, Kizuki, Watanabe has moved to study in Tokyo, where the students are rioting and great social change is in the air. Further upheaval occurs when Kizuki’s introverted girlfriend, Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi), appears and the two are united in their unspoken grief. After they eventually consummate their relationship, Naoko goes into retreat at a rural sanatorium while Watanabe remains in Tokyo, loyal. But then he meets Midori (Kiko Mizuhara) to whom he is attracted. Watanabe has to choose between the two women, who represent his known past and his possible future.

You know that when a film due to run for 133 minutes opens with a suicide, it is not going to be a frothy, light-hearted experience. The unexplained death is the catalyst for everything that follows in this drama based on the best-selling novel by Haruki Murakami.

There are two things I particularly like about this film. The first is the cinematography by Ping Bin Lee, who has luxuriously lensed it with many lingering wide shots, combined well with an unusual, but effective, number of close-ups. It helps to imbue the story with a poetic dimension; Watanabe is clearly a man disconnected from the madding crowds, and is only swept along or buffeted by them; when in the countryside, he and Naoko are both physically and emotionally isolated, a pair lost in a landscape of despair. The second is the production design. I was especially impressed with the blending of colours of both settings and actors’ clothing, with fine attention to detail. Never have ‘60s plaid trousers and close-fitting body shirts looked so good.

Less appealing was the story. There are oddly-placed scenes which jar, and performances which, whilst overall very good, are uneven. The cerebral nature of the story – one young man’s coming to terms with a death at an impressionable age – is a tough one to pull off, and I am not sure that it is realisable in cinematic form. All of the characters are suffering, each in their own way, and all of the women characters dump their emotional worries onto the long-suffering Watanabe, who has a knack for attracting needy women. Interestingly, the only other male character, the worldly-wise Hatsumi (Eriko Hatsune) is one whom Watanabe has less and less respect for over time. The aim seems to be to contrast Watanabe’s sensitive character with Hatsumi’s flagrantly self-interested one, but it doesn’t quite work, in part due again to the editing, but also because we don’t spend enough time with Hatsumi to find much sympathy for him. Similarly, I wanted to know more about another sanitarium in-patient Nagasawa (Tetsuji Tamayama), and felt short-changed by her limited screen time.

Norwegian Wood is a beautiful piece to look at, but comes up short in the story department.

Want more about this film?

Want something different?