Although Norwegian Wood falls within the group of Murakami's novels that I am perhaps least fond of, those being the ones which could be broadly & misleadingly categorized as straightforward realism; & though the film tended to highlight all those bits of the novel which were the most unappealing to me; & though it has been nearly a full year since I saw this one, I am going to go ahead and give this movie a "positive review," or whatever.
Murakami tends to shine brightest, for me at least, when the alienation and sadness of his characters is more refracted than expressed or symbolically deployed.
Especially when those moments of magical realism or explosive violence don't
comfortably fit into any explanatory frame (or at least when they manage to
evade the ones that I attempt to apply), with the prime example being the rain
of leeches from Kafka on the Shore. With a close second being the assault from
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Norwegian Wood has none of these moments, instead off(er)ing characters whose reactions tend toward the extreme but whose psychological makeup is fairly easily
ascertained. And it is very much within these extremes that the characters of
the film operate, placing their reactions at the emotional and dramatic center.
The scene in which the main character stands on a rock screaming and crying
being only the most obvious and unfortunate instance.
By choosing to do what it does, though, and sticking to it faithfully, it succeeds
on its own terms. Given that it is the story of a set of varyingly solipsistic
youth and their attempt to connect to each other, the cinematography which is
often so pretty it verges on cloying fits very well, even and especially that it
flirts with kitsch in a way that I think I have only ever seen Antichrist do; the woods around the psychiatric retreat in particular are shot with an almost alienating reverence that I still remember very vividly today. Unfortunately, the score isn't really up to par, at least in my memory, and the short shrift given to the roommate
and the school friend is really disappointing.
The absolute best thing about the movie, however, is the way that it doesn't forget
its sociohistorical moment, or try to shoehorn its relevance. When, in the
beginning, we see masked-up student radicals rushing across the background of
the scenes, we are given the tools by which to situate the film.
Murakami's fiction can be broadly read in two ways; as universal or as particular. It has moments in support of both, but it is only at its best when read through its
particularity. He deals with broad themes, of course, but to fail to acknowledge
them as acting through very specific subsets defangs them, makes them into
boring paeans on Modernity and Loneliness and so on. It is in particular in his
more realistic fiction that the impulse to read this way is present, and it is
why I tend to find it boring.
The inclusion of those students, racing across the background of the frame, seemed
to me a wonderful acknowledgement of that fact. We are not here to experience
the lives of those who seek to change the world. But they exist, and obliquely
inform, the lives we do experience. And, like the song from which the title is
taken, we find ourselves experiencing that particular story of impossible,
painful intimacy that tends to crop up only when absolutely everything in the
world around us is broken, and we are too wrapped up in the pains of our
particular moment to notice the trend.
Just as Rubber Soul marked the break between the early Beatles and the late, this film indexes a vary particular instance of the moment that the popular was forced to reckon with the political. And just as Norwegian Wood (this bird has flown) opened a
space for non-Anglophonic instrumentation within pop music, finally taking a
tentative step away from the purely insular and at least nominally creating a
space for dialogue (see: "world music," and all its problems), this
film is an act of translation in a wonderful sense, albeit one whose impact has
not, and almost certainly will never, be felt. It translates the moment of its
production, of its content, and of the moment that it title takes from, and
returns them to the Anglophonic sphere, mutated through all these
transformations that register only in brief flashes in the background. And it
does this, when it manages not to fail, by speaking through the particular,
which is not to say the individual.
It's own particularity is that it manages to index without abstracting; we see these
characters, and they are not us, and they do not live near us, and we do not
become them, but we might live with them in their cinematographically advanced
world for a moment. In its best moments of the film, it manages to not reduce
the characters (it keeps) to depression-type and angst-type and turmoil-type
without whispering to you that there is a reason for this, but they cannot see
it so you cannot either, unless you choose to look; but even if you do, do not
forget that you are the intruder here.
Of course, what we watch when we see this film is a particularly well-done form of
kitsch, and it is not unimportant to note how this is reinforced by the melodrama
of the narrative, in which nothing really happens except that everyone fucking
dies. So it isn't so much that the characters react unrealistically to how
shitty everything is as that the world itself is an adjunct to their solipsism.
Which is why when the student radicals appear, their passing leaves such a
strong impression; even if this whole world is a solipsistic nightmare where
all your friends kill themselves and sex is even more traumatic and alienated
than everything else and the only way out is a desperate search for love with
someone who will only be immediately codependent on without anything changing,
at least this isn't the only possibility for everyone, even if it is for who we
see.
But again, this is all deeply embedded into the fabric of the film; the melodrama
that constitutes the film's narrative never touches it. It is relentless, and
that is only useful as a backdrop, not a moral, because the second it becomes
the center it adopts the frame of love which is always then reduced. The love
story at the center of the film is The Love Story, of course, and ultimately
who really cares. It is that The Love Story is framed subtly in this way that
matters.