Norwegian Wood

Venice (In Competition) – Isn't it good, Norwegian Wood? asked John Lennon in 1965. Well John, responds Paul Martin, if you were making a spookily prescient reference to the 2010 movie which shares a title with your acoustic ditty then the answer is yes. Yes it is.

There is a scene in Norwegian Wood, the film adaptation of the Haruki Murakami novel of the same name, which sees troubled 20-year-old, Naoko (played by Rinko Kikuchi), beginning to weep as her older friend, Reiko (Reika Kirishima), plays a version of the eponymous Beatles song on her guitar. The melancholic effect exerted on Naoko by a tune that, lyrically speaking, is often taken as evidence of a juvenile sexist streak in its author, John Winston Lennon, does much to reveal the raison d'être of director Tran Anh Hung's movie.

For while Tran dispenses with the flashback framing device of the 1987 source novel, and while the story focuses on characters in the very early throes of adulthood, Norwegian Wood is less a direct reflection of the passions of youth and more a bittersweet reminiscence on the ephemeral nature of those passions – the sad tilt of the titular song stemming from its evocation of a time of possibility now washed away by the flow of history.

The central protagonist of Norwegian Wood is Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama), who when we first glimpse him is a contented high schooler in 1967 Japan, his days enriched by his friendship with Kizuki (Kengo Kora), and the latter's girlfriend, the aforementioned Naoko. But if Watanabe is contented, it transpires that Kizuki is anything but, with him one day running a hosepipe from his car exhaust into the vehicle itself and gassing himself to death in a sequence which Tran ensures makes uncomfortable viewing for the audience, as they watch Kizuki sweating and choking as the carbon monoxide fumes extinguish his young life.

Two years on, and Watanabe has attempted to put this tragedy behind him, moving to Tokyo to study literature. His university is a scene of militant protests, with masked banner-wavers roaming the concourses, and lectures being angrily denounced by students as an irrelevance given the political climate of the day. Yet despite this fashion for collective action, Watanabe remains aloof from the majority of his classmates, preferring to spend his time lost in the pages of a book. And it is while reading that he happens to meet Naoko again, this chance encounter leading first to a renewal of the bond between them, and ultimately to them making love on the occasion of her 20th birthday – a deed he completes with all the undue rapidity of Boris Becker trying to shoot his wad before the main course arrives.

But in the wake of this coupling of bodies, Naoko abruptly moves away, leaving the abandoned Watanabe to turn his attentions to fellow student Midori (Kiko Mizuhara). With he and Midori procrastinating over whether to take their friendship further, Naoko finally re-establishes contact, she having retreated to a remote clinic where she is receiving treatment for deep depression, the spectre of Kizuki's suicide still hanging over her, as it also does over Watanabe.

Given that the global popularity and critical worship of Haruki Murakami's novels has thus far failed to trigger a slew of big screen adaptations, it is perhaps logical that a first such significant feature is derived from one of the writer's straighter novels; Norwegian Wood being bereft of the esoteric eccentricities that colour the likes of Dance Dance Dance and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. And the fidelity to the book demonstrated by director Tran is largely unimpeachable, with the narrative having been translated into cinematic form with little amendment, the one obvious change being the sacrifice of any explanation of the demons that led to Reiko's admittance to the clinic.

I was blown away by the stunning visuals crafted by Tran for his 1995 offering, Cyclo, and the Vietnamese filmmaker here again delivers a series of truly beautiful sequences, via the silkily zooming and gliding camerawork of his cinematographer, Lee Ping-bin (Wong Kar-Wai's DoP on In the Wood for Love). One shot of a fraught Naoko in a forest is pure horror movie dread, pinioned as she seems to be by the jagged grey trees arrayed like prison bars around her, while there is a fabulous late sequence when Watanabe calls Midori – he enveloped in a cold gloom, talking into a fire engine red telephone, she being contrastingly bathed in early morning winter sunshine, giving a uniform yellow tint to her cardigan and the walls of her apartment. Via the juxtaposition of these two artful compositions, Tran provides visual elucidation of the idea of Midori that might rescue Watanabe from the existential anger that claimed the life of Kizuki.

It is not all ocular delight either, with Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood contributing a sensitive score, and the retro soundtrack picks being dominated by spacey cuts from krautrockers Can. And although the story is not quite as peerlessly handled by Tran as the aesthetic presentation – the veering of Watanabe between the two girls gets trapped in something of a repetitive loop, and there is an overly long wallow down a misery cul-de-sac near the film's end – this is, for the most part, an absorbing tale, touching upon universal concerns of being trapped by your own past and fear of facing the future.

The craftsmanship of Tran is matched by strong performances from the cast, particularly Kikuchi and Matsuyama, and these elements reach a perfect pitch in one scene in particular, when Watanabe and an agitated Naoko talk in a field, the memory of Kizuki finally dragged out into the open as she reveals why she departed for the clinic after their night together. As the pair pace back and forth, framed in the verdant emerald expanse, Kikuchi takes her character on an impressively far-reaching emotional journey in the space of a single unbroken take. It is the outstanding individual scene in what is overall a very fine film.

Rating on a scale of 5 philandering '60s pop icons: 4

Release date: TBC
Directed by: Tran Anh Hung
Screenplay by: Tran Anh Hung, based on the novel by Haruki Murakami
Cast: Kenichi Matsuyama, Rinko Kikuchi, Kiko Mizuhara, Reika Kirishima
Cert: TBC
Running Time: 133 minutes

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