Tran Anh Hung’s
“Norwegian Wood” (**1/2) is too thoughtful and immaculately crafted a replacement to render it the wrong choice, but an hour into this oppressively languid Haruki Murakami adaptation, I couldn’t help feeling I’d have been having a better time at the Breillat.
Generally a thing of beauty on the page, Murakami’s staid, studied prose doesn’t immediately strike the reader as a gift to filmmakers. Admittedly tackling one of the author’s wispier (albeit extremely popular) works – a meditation on grief and first love among three young Japanese adults (Rinko Kikuchi, Kenichi Matsuyama and Kiko Mizuhara) against the social shifts of the late 1960s – Tran’s adaptation doesn’t do much to change that perception: indeed, for its opening third, the film seems crippled by its awe for the source material: reams of voiceover are applied to inform of us things that are (or at least should be) already abundantly clear on screen, giving the curious effect of an illustrated audio-book.
The filmmaking gains in confidence once this technique is phased out for more hushed visual storytelling, but it also only underlines the fact that there isn’t much of a story here to tell – 133 minutes is a punishing length of time during which to be informed that teenagers both like and fear sex, and that death bums them out. At half that length, the film could be an affecting miniature; as it stands, it’s an overstretched canvas for Mark Lee’s masterly lensing, locating warmth and textures of light many others are still struggling to find in HD, and Jonny Greenwood’s lushly abrasive score. Hung, perhaps still best known for the 1993 Oscar nominee “The Scent of Green Papaya” (though this will likely change that), remains a filmmaker of distinct sensual intelligence, but his gifts prove mostly decorative on material insufficiently imagined for its new medium.
Hello.
Slowly but surely…
— W. H. Auden
Very occasionally they would employ the word “mingle” to refer to intercourse, but even then the most striking example of this is when the bones of Achilles and Patroclus are mingled together in death.
Aphrodite was not the goddess of love as is popularly believed, as we tell our children. She was the Goddess of Sex. The patron goddess of prostitutes in fact. And her son, Eros, dear little Cupid with his darling little arrows, was the god of passion.
And this is why even Sappho spoke only of longing, of pain, of sex, of people being precious to her, this is why even Sappho never used the word “love.” It didn’t exist.
—Girls, Nic Kelman
This is what I do for a living… the other half of the time anyway.
20100731-IMG_6258.jpg, originally uploaded by Tetanus
Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn…)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(…that time is the fire in which we burn.)(This is the school in which we learn…)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn…)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(…that time is the fire in which they burn.)Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
— Delmore Schwartz
It’s the first time I’ve attended a concert at the Singapore Indoor Stadium. Embarrassing, I know…
The show ran for two hours and ended nicely on a high with ‘霍元甲’.
I want one for no other reason than the fact that it is uber-cool. the icon battery pack for iPhone by Essential TPE.
About
33, male and very Cancerian. Often irascible, even if he is prescient to his emotions.
Lives for the resonance of beautiful passages, cinematic magic and aural bliss. Dabbles in fiction writing, photography, sketching and daydreaming in his free time, even though he is paid to do just those in a professional capacity.
He is, in other words, quite a geek.
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