Norwegian Wood is about love. It is about finding love in the most awkward and dire of places, and having to make a choice between one and the other – between the past or the future, a former love or a new love.

Tara Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) is on a flight to Hamburg when he hears the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” Like the most powerful of songs, Watanabe is taken back into time to his younger self when he was part of the world’s youth who wanted to overthrow The Man.

As the Beatles’ Norwegian Wood plays, you’ll realize that this isn’t your typical Hollywood romantic teen movie. The actors are young, yes. But you won’t find any cookie cutter “boy meets girl they fight break up and fall in love again” cheesy storylines here. Just like the old Beatles song, this film is more mature and tackles coming of age issues.

There are seven main protagonists in the film and they are all connected by the opening character and narrator of the film, Watanabe. Each suffers from some sort of depression and deep complexes which, of course, set the film’s course. At 19 years old, Watanabe confronts the first major suicide (yes, “first suicide” – I did say the movie was pretty deep) by his friend, Kizuki (Kengo Kara). He bumps into his best friend’s girlfriend Kaoko (Rinko Kikuchi), and in what seems like an attempt to make up for not being able to save his friend, Watanabe takes care of the mentally fragile Kaoko and falls in love with her. On the girls 20th birthday, they make love. But Watanabe says something wrong and reminds Kaoko of her lost love, and she vanishes from Watanabe’s life.

While coping with the loss of his best friend, and his best friend’s girlfriend whom he dated after his death, Watanabe meets another girl. Midori (Kiko Mizuhara) is the opposite of Kaoko. Where Kaoko was a gloomy melancholic day, Midori was a ray of sunshine rolling down a green grassy hill naked. Yes, naked. Midori talks dirty, taunts Watanabe, and is purely unpredictable. It is these two primary relationships – between Kaoko and Midori – that Watanabe must choose. Both obviously symbolically represent death and life for Watanabe.

Other memorable characters throughout the film include Reiko (Reika Kirishima), Kaoko’s roommate at the sanitarium where she disappears to. Watanabe has an affair with her on his visits to Kaoko. Watanabe also learns lessons from another one of his relationships with his playboy friend, Nagasawa (Tetsuji Tamayama). He condemns the way he treats his girlfriend and ultimately realizes he has to man up, and grow up. He accomplishes this, of course, by the end of the film.

Norwegian Wood, as a film, is just a mushed up version of Haruki Murakami’s novel of the same title, compressed into a two and a half hour long movie. Books turned into movies rarely, if ever, work out well this way. In this case, it fails. Important character back stories are dropped, their character traits dismissed, and sub-stories of the novel disappear in order to get the movie done by the rolling credits. To make up for this, the movie is beautifully shot, and the visuals surely will impress you in a way you never thought possible in this sort of romantic movie. But we all know, especially with matters of the heart, beauty without substance deserves nothing more than just wood – Norwegian wood to be precise (I suggest you listen to the Beatles song and listen for the meaning).

Poster courtesy of Norwegian Wood.

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