On ‘Norwegian Wood’ the film

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.

—Guy Lodge, InContention.com