Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi) and Watanabe (Ken'ichi Matsuyama) search for love in NORWEGIAN WOOD
NORWEGIAN WOOD (NORUWEI NO MORI) (Tran Anh Hung, 2010)
IFC Center
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Thursday, January 12, $16, 8:00
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First it took a long time for French-Vietnamese writer-director Tran Anh Hung (Ths Scent of Green Papaya) to convince Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami to let him adapt his 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood — Tran had been interested in turning the book into a movie ever since he first read it in 1994, but Murakami notoriously does not allow his novels to become films — and then, once the film was made and played at prestigious festivals in Venice, Toronto, and Dubai, still took more than a year to find a U.S. distributor. Currently running at the IFC Center, Norwegian Wood is a moving, faithful adaptation of Murakami’s elegiac novel about unrequited love, romantic communication, and death. After his best friend, Kizuki (Kengo Kora), commits suicide, Watanabe (Death Note’s Ken’ichi Matsuyama) and Kizuki’s girlfriend, Naoko (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi), who previously were part of an inseparable trio with Kizuki, go their separate ways. After a short time, they meet up accidentally in Tokyo, where Watanabe is attending university and Naoko is trying to get over her loss. But an event on her twentieth birthday causes Naoko to take off again, this time seeking professional help at a sanitarium. Watanabe can’t stop thinking about Naoko, jeopardizing a possible relationship with the aggressive, sexually open Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), who already has a boyfriend but is extremely interested in Watanabe. Meanwhile, Watanabe disapproves of how his friend Nagasawa (Tetsuji Tamayama) continually cheats on his girlfriend, Hatsumi (Eriko Hatsune), who is devoted to him. With the student riots of the late 1960s swirling around them, Watanabe, Naoko, Midori, Nagasawa, Hatsumi, and Naoko’s roommate, Reiko (Reika Kirishima), take long, hard looks at what they want out of life and love, and they don’t always like what they find. Beautifully shot by Mark Lee Ping Bin (In the Mood for Love) and featuring a subtle score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood), Norwegian Wood is a slow-paced, psychologically intense drama. Watanabe and Naoko are often shown walking amid vast natural landscapes of green forests and snow-covered mountains, but they are tied up tight within themselves, trapped in their own memories. The carefully composed sex scenes give depth and intelligence to the main characters without overplaying their emotions. The story itself might be relatively slight — it lacks the range of Murakami’s later books — but Tran has done a fine job bringing it to the screen.
The story of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s rise from abject poverty to lead his nation is an inspirational, fascinating one. But unfortunately, you won’t find it in Fábio Barreto’s overly earnest, extremely reverential Lula, Son of Brazil. Based on the book by Denise Paraná, the film follows Lula from his childhood with an abusive father (Milhem Cortaz) to his studying to become a machinist and eventually develop into a beloved labor organizer. But the script, by Daniel Tendler, Denise Papana, and Fernando Bonassi, merely hops from important moment to important moment, forgoing any kind of narrative flow and instead feeling like an unconnected series of greatest hits delivered in a matter-of-fact manner devoid of emotion, coming off as flat and trite. His relationship with his devoted mother (Glória Pires) is clichéd and predictable, and his two romances lack any kind of passion. Played by Felipe Falanga as a child, Guilherme Tortólio as an adolescent, and Rui Ricardo Diaz as a grown man, Lula is clearly an inspirational figure in his homeland, but Barreto turns him into a cardboard character in this boring biopic that for some unknown reason ends right before a critical juncture in Lula’s life and career.
British filmmaker Patrick Keiller’s follow-up to 1994’s London and 1997’s Robinson in Space is another staggering achievement, a gorgeous pairing of word and image resulting in something fresh, challenging, and unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. The conceit behind Robinson in Ruins is that it consists of found footage taken by a man named Robinson, with text from his rather eclectic notebook; in fact, every shot is carefully planned by writer, director, and editor Keiller, with the narrative added later, intoned by Vanessa Redgrave. The camera barely moves throughout the film’s one hundred and one minutes; instead, it remains still as it depicts a construction site, rapeseed fields, nuclear power plants, a mail slot, and a street corner, the only signs of movement the wind blowing through the trees, a passing car, or industrial smoke. People are virtually nonexistent as Redgrave reads Robinson’s complex treatise on agriculture, architecture, the economic crisis, history, politics, and opium, all centered around, as Keiller said at the press preview at the 2010 New York Film Festival, “the problem of dwelling.” Robinson in Ruins is like a tour through a thrilling art exhibition, each piece beautifully composed, coupled with fiercely intellectual poetry that is wonderful to listen to, even if much of it is impossible to understand. The film is screening January 13-18 at Anthology Film Archives as part of “Patrick Keiller’s Robinson Trilogy,” which also includes multiple showings of London and Robinson in Space as well as Keiller’s 2000 work The Dilapidated Dwelling and the 1986 short The End.
During the Korean War, the north and south did battle over a series of hills, with the key locations changing hands of over and over, sometimes multiple times the same day. Director Jang Hun tells the fictionalized story of one such hill, Aero.K, in the tense military thriller The Front Line. Shin Ha-Kyun (Thirst, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) stars as Lt. Kang Eun-pyo, an investigator who has been sent to the eastern front to uncover a possible spy. Upon joining Alligator Company, Eun-pyo is surprised to find his old college friend, Kim Su-hyeok (Ko Soo), a former scared grunt who had been captured by the North Koreans and has now blossomed into a strong leader — and quickly becomes the leading candidate to be the potential traitor. The hill has changed hands so often that each side has been secretly communicating with the other by leaving such materials as photos, letters, and alcohol in a hidden spot, developing a relationship that reveals their humanity but also could compromise them on the field. And as a possible armistice approaches, the brass ramps up the fighting in a series of last-ditch efforts to take the hill and expand the potential demarcation line in their favor. Park Sang-yeon’s script is filled with clichéd characters and familiar plot lines, leaning toward the melodramatic, but Jang still makes it work, building the violent film around the strong main characters and several powerful, unexpected twists. South Korea’s official entry for the Academy Awards, The Front Line is a gritty epic that reveals man’s inhumanity to man and the ultimate futility of war. The film opens at the AMC 25 on January 20, but you can get a free sneak peek at it tonight at Tribeca Cinemas, where its east coast premiere kicks off the latest installment of Korean Movie Night, “Jang Hun Plus One!” which examines the career of the director, who cut his teeth working with Kim Ki-duk. The series continues January 24 with 2008’s Rough Cut, February 15 with 2010’s Secret Reunion,, and February 28 with the North American premiere of Park Shin-woo’s White Night.