"Love hurts" is a staple message of popular culture everywhere, from blues songs about cheating lovers to tear-jerking Japanese melodramas about teenage couples eternally separated by terminal disease. But "Love can drive you crazy" is one uncomfortable truth mainstream movies, from Hollywood and Japan alike, shy from, for good box office reasons. Their target female audience, who enjoy a good cry over romance gone wrong, is less willing to vicariously dwell in the hell of clinical depression.
That, however, is what "Norwegian Wood (Noruwei no Mori)," Anh Hung Tran's adaptation of the eponymous Haruki Murakami novel, asks them to do.
Watching the film after it screened in this year's Venice Film Festival competition — and left with mixed reviews and not a single prize — I understood why it had taken more than two decades to bring the novel to the screen, despite the 4 million copies sold since its 1987 publication.