Norwegian Wood

View trailer and more info: http://www.vietfilmfest.com/norwegian-wood.html

Synopsis by Khanh Ho:

Norwegian Wood, the novel by Haruki Murakami, is a masterwork of postmodern despair—stark, subtle, monotone; Norwegian Wood, the movie by Tran Anh Hung, is a hybrid effusion—lush, rich, emotional. The world that the movie explores bristles with nostalgia in a way that the book’s mise en scène does not: saturated colors, polyester shirts, cluttered dorms. This is not the landscape of modernity but of coming-into-modernity: a world of precipice and edge. This is a universe at a doorway before an economic boom period, that might just as well recall present-day Viet Nam as it does a Japan of yore—a world altogether easy to forget ever existed.

Into this world, two lovers are brought together by a loss—a suicide—that is the hole in the center of their broken lives. Tran Anh Hung’s genius takes over where Murakami’s ends. We get the suffering but also the exuberance, the profound sadness but also the ecstasy. Heavy themes dot the landscape of this Norwegian wood: mental illness, infidelity, guilt, repression. Fans of Haruki Murakami’s writing, just like all fans of all books-cum-movies, will likely be disappointed by riffs and departures, but just as Murakami took the iconic Beatle’s song “Norwegian Wood” and turned it into his own story, so Tran Anh Hung has adapted the narrative into his signature creation. It represents an entryway into the director’s own special world of heartbreaking, tender emptiness.