At the beginning, after using a few shots to set up the relationship with Naoko, I directly entered the process of suicide. The exact reproduction of the suicide process in the original brings the audience into an invisible atmosphere of heaviness, hesitation and depression, and in the roar of the car engine, it seems to have entered a fear and confusion with the Watanabes in the film. world.
Although compared with the smooth storytelling of the original book, the film gives the impression that the story lacks a sense of integrity. After some scenes were deleted due to censorship reasons, the various behavioral motives of the characters in the story are even more difficult for audiences who have not read the original book to understand. However, Anh Hung Tran is Anh Hung Tran after all, and it makes sense that むらかみはるき chose him to adapt his work among so many directors. Anh Hung Tran captures several essences of the original book to interpret Murakami's story.
As Watanabe ran through the corridor, the blurred yellow light overflowed with the fluttering curtains, and the whole picture almost became a painting, suffocatingly beautiful. Anh Hung Tran's consistent obsession and emphasis on color is fully reflected in this film. The use of large green color blocks highlights his consistent image characteristics since "The Smell of Green Papaya", and is also a good continuation of the director's own style. Many shots in the forest and wilderness in the film have a strong sense of beauty, and some can even be used directly as a desktop. For example, the scene where Watanabe and Naoko lie in the fields near the nursing home in the film can be called amazing. Coupled with Anh Hung Tran's almost demanding way of filming his own works, the film is quite good in terms of the atmosphere of the era and the setting of the space, which well shows the characteristics of the era in the late 1960s set in the original book. This is a prominent manifestation of the overall exquisite style of the film, and it is also an important weight to guide the audience to go deeper into nostalgia.
After committing suicide, Watanabe and Naoko left their original city and went to another unfamiliar city. After the two met again, they began to fall in love. Until Naoko's birthday, the two finally had a relationship. Perhaps due to the deletion, this passionate scene with the sound of rain and Naoko's crying moans as the background "music", which unfolded slowly in the quiet blue rainy night, was appropriately performed in a juvenile and innocent manner.
Naoko has been in a nursing home since then. Several scenes of Watanabe visiting Naoko in a sanatorium are almost comparable to Zhang Yimou's, stretching the lyrical tension of the scenery to the extreme: the valley of the sanatorium is surrounded by dazzling green, the forest shrouded in mist, and the snow that fills the mountains and plains in winter. , fluttering snowflakes, all constitute a beautiful picture, allowing the audience to enter a beautiful world away from the mundane while feeling pure love.
The ending of the film is faithful to the original book with almost no changes, only adding a line to Watanabe: "The four seasons change, and the distance between me and the deceased also sharply widens. I'm still seventeen years old, and Naoko is still twenty-one. Forever." It would be even better if we used the phrase "We are living, and the only thing we have to think about is how to live".
The curtain of some people's lives was slowly drawn, and the curtain of the ending of some plays was also slowly drawn. "Norwegian Wood" is a barely successful adaptation, albeit with many regrets. (
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