Norwegian Wood Movie Eng Sub Download Film
Catarina Marsalis
Norwegian Wood (ノルウェイの森, Noruwei no Mori) is a 2010 Japanese romantic drama film directed by Tran Anh Hung, based on the 1987 novel by Haruki Murakami. It was released in Japan on 11 December 2010.[2] The score was composed by Jonny Greenwood.
The score was composed by Jonny Greenwood.[4] He used a Japanese nylon-strung guitar with home recording equipment from the 1960s, attempting to create a recording that one of the characters might have made.[5]
In the United Kingdom, it was released on 11 March 2011.[7] In the United States, the film had a limited release on 6 January 2012 in New York City and Washington D.C.[8] In Canada, the film was released on 2 March 2012.[9]
The Daily Telegraph said that Hung was "brave" to attempt to adapt Murakami's 1987 novel but that "the film comes across as a mere summary of Murakami's book".[10] Stephen Holden of The New York Times wrote that it "registers less as a coherent narrative than as a tortuous reverie steeped in mournful yearning".[11]
The soundtrack features original compositions by Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood. His pieces fit the atmosphere and mood of the movie very well and are worth a listen to even on their own. I was also pleasantly surprised to hear so many songs by the German rock group CAN, one of my personal favorite bands.
there's a reason that murakami has only been adapted to film twice... and that reason is because murakami doesn't part with his rights lightly. okay, so there are *two* reasons why murakami has only been adapted to film twice, and the other one is because of how internal his prose is. NORWEGIAN WOOD is at once an obvious and terrible choice of novels to adapt, popular but emotionally elusive and devoid of fantastical elements that might more easily conform to the cinema. this is a lovely enough movie, but it confuses elusiveness with meaning... the book is a story about the things that escape its characters, but Murakami's text resonates because he so beautifully maps the distance between the protagonist and the things beyond his grasp. the film is capable only of locating that space and stepping around it like a puddle of melting snow.
Jonny Greenwood's masterfully haunting score manages to prop up some of the film's emotional deficiencies, but you can practically hear exactly where Murakami's prose would fit into the awkward silences.
Murakami's books are virtually impossible to translate into films. The book's strongest qualities were its atmosphere and characters, both of which are lacking in this film.
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The film's style, on the other hand, is beautiful. Japanese hippies and yuppies are not something you are used to seeing, and Midori with her huge glasses is just *chef kiss*. The score was a pleasant surprise and spot on as always.
Although he sometimes uses voiceover to render Watanabe's internal monologues, Tran makes the story more overt. (That's nearly inevitable when translating prose to filmed drama.) Occasionally, the movie becomes too high-pitched, notably when the string-heavy score, by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, shifts from plaintive to emphatic. The tone is more naturalistic when the action is cued to period rock by Can, the Doors and (of course) the Beatles.
Only Tran's fifth feature since his elegant 1993 debut, The Scent of Green Papaya, Norwegian Wood includes lovely, contemplative sequences set near Naoko's refuge, as well as a few along a rocky seashore. The movie was filmed in widescreen by Mark Lee Ping Bin (best known for working on In the Mood for Love), and its stately compositions suggest Asian scroll paintings. Yet some of the scenes are kinetic, even agitated.
It has endured as a modern classic ever since, and has been embraced by readers over here. In fact, it is probably one of my favourite novels, although funnily enough, mainly for nostalgic reasons. So when I found out that film adaptation was imminent, I was definitely excited.
You can never be too sure when it comes to adaptations, but I had a good feeling about this one. This was further fuelled by glowing press reports describing it as lyrical and sumptuous. I was jazzed for it. But then I saw the film, and while not a bad movie, it definitely was a bad adaptation. But why? What went wrong with it, and why did I come out of the cinema feeling, well, a bit let down and drained by it all, actually?
The action never really opens up, and it is most definitely, bar a few scenes, a movie of telling and not showing. The film is intensely dialogue heavy, and while it may seem an odd thing to complain about in a book adaptation, I think I can justify it.
Films and books are not the same thing, despite their many shared narrative structures, reliance on imagery, and adaptations of each other. People often tend to forget that, and will often try to make a direct copy of book into a film. This never works. As I have stated above, they are separate mediums, and I think this is obviously so in Norwegian Wood.
While by no means bad, the film of Norwegian Wood is, to me, slightly unsatisfying (though it definitely grew on me as it went and the scenes towards the end pack quite a strong emotional punch). I also feel very conflicted about it, it clearly has both merits and flaws, but I find it difficult to separate my feelings about these from my feelings about the novel.
In fact, almost all of the characters in the novel have some sort of life event which causes them to be haunted with sorrow for many years (for example, the suicide of a loved one), and each of them handle this emotion differently, either isolating themselves, ignoring them, or trying to face them. This is the theme I want to use as the point of comparison in my essay, how people handle their sadness, but I can't seem to find a corresponding film.
Normally I'd suggest films based on other authors who influenced Murakami, but your description brings to mind Samaritan Girl (South Korea, 2004) which hits all the notes of suicide, sadness, reflection, contrasting loneliness/isolation and physical intimacy, grappling with adulthood, and the ripple effect of suffering across multiple characters.
SG explores these themes in a protracted time and presents the events starkly, leaving emotional analysis to the viewer. This might be a bit too different for your liking. Since it's a Korean film I also worry about seeming to conflate cultures: Murakami has influenced and been influenced by many things, but Korean cinema is not one of them, so making a connection feels like it needs pre-discussion ("not just lumping all of Asia together", etc.). That said, I think it fits the bill.
Being the immediate thing that came to mind regarding your question, Black mirror is an anthology series concerned with dystopian realities set within the not-too-distant future where the prominent subject is of humanity, behaviors, ideals and technology. In this episode, which with modern quality television production standards is more like a short, 1 hour film, the main character deals with loss in a very unusual way.
The novel has won worldwide popularity, and many directors had approached the author to adapt it to film. More than 10 million copies of the book have been sold in Japan alone, with 2.6 million more sold in another 33 languages.
With a legion of Murakami fans out there, and with Norwegian Wood almost certainly being the simplest of his books to adapt for the screen, it was always the most likely to be made into a film. So a couple of weeks ago, I went to see it at a screening. Having read the book, and being a fan of Asian cinema in general, the fact I wasn't blown away by it did take me by surprise. Accidentally overheard someone saying that there were only 40 pages of script for over two hours of screen time, and the lack of interaction between actors stretched my attention span to the limit. It became a borderline period melodrama, and despite being well constructed, beautifully shot, and very faithful to the original work, there was definitely something lacking to push Tran Anh Hung's adaptation from being good to great.
On the plus side, one of the strengths of the film was my other reason for being there. Jonny Greenwood is no stranger to soundtracks these days, and Norwegian Wood benefited from his instrumental score greatly. Sympathetic during the build up, then sweeping and opaque in emphasis, his soundtrack gave the film an extra emotional depth. The players, the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Robert Ziegler, and the Emperor Quartet have found tiny nuances in their sections and accentuated them. On 'Reiko', the Emperor Quartet bring the music to life, their three violins and cello taking the lead and intertwine to push forth a heightened sense of fragility and violent emotion while retaining a sense of restraint. Having worked with Greenwood on Body Song, they show what a solid understanding between composer and players can really mean for the execution of a work on 'Ate mo Naku Aruki Mawatta'. It could have been one of those blink-and-you-miss-it moments, but manages to be cinematic in scale without being 'soundtracky', which is no mean feat in under two minutes, even with an orchestra in tow.
Music of the era in which Norwegian Wood is set is vital to the ambience of the film too. Can, a band to whom I'd never really given much thought, have a few songs too. Having been covered many moons ago by Radiohead, it's hard not to look for and see the influence they've had musically from just the few examples given here. Although this won't be telling fans of the band anything new, Can have a dense multi-layered sound, guitar-led but acutely reliant on polyrhythm. The obvious debt Radiohead owe them for songs like 'Optimistic' is repaid here with their inclusion, and 'Bring me Coffee or Tea' and 'Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone' will no doubt find them a new mini-legion of converts.
But if Can are included, then there are a couple of significant absentees from the soundtrack roster. 'Norwegian Wood' by the Beatles is the most obvious, but then again, it's also a song that has so much weight within the context of the film that its presence would have been too much for the rest of the soundtrack to bear. Its absence is only felt in terms of completion's sake. More sadly missed is 'Indian Summer' by The Doors, one of their looser, more languid tracks from Morrison Hotel. It can only be speculated as to why it isn't on show here, despite being expertly and appropriately placed within the film itself.
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