NORWEGIAN WOOD

The film adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s best-selling novel Norwegian Wood by director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of the Green Papaya) certainly can’t be faulted for its veracity. Slow, minutiae-fuelled scenes set against a heady Japan of the 1960s find the inscrutable Toru (Kenichi Matsuyama) having to chose between life (a bubbly, childlike Midori, played by Kiko Mizuhara) and death (a beautiful, distressed Naoko, played by Rinko Kikuchi). As with Murakami novels, where emotional affect coalesces by increments, very little seems to actually happen in this movie. Yet it’s beautiful all the same – especially the snow-swept scenes at the sanitarium Naoko flees to, and the achingly vibrant swimming pools of a summer in Tokyo with Midori. However while this nothingness works in the sealed-off, complex psychological space of a novel, it seems less so played out against the flat screen of a movie. Points to Hung nonetheless for trying. (AB) ***