Summary
As weird and magically real as you’d imagine from the mind of Haruki Murikami, the ripple effect of the 2011 earthquakes reverberate through all of the interconnected pieces
Haruki Murakami’s short stories have proven to be fertile ground for cinema, with adaptations ranging from Burning to the award-winning Drive My Car. French animator Pierre Földes BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN (Saules aveugles, femme endormie) takes inspiration from Murakami’s 2006 anthology of the same name, along with pieces from The Elephant Vanishes, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and After The Quake.
Indeed, the latter serves as the jumping off point for the film, which begins days after the devastating events of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Kyoko (voiced by Shoshana Wilder in the English language version) is near catatonic, watching nothing but news coverage. When she leaves her apathetic husband Komura (Ryan Bommarito), who is in the process of losing his job, he goes on a journey to Hokkaido to deliver a mysterious package.
Meanwhile, banker Katagiri (Marcelo Arroyo) – who happens to work for the same company as Komura – is overtasked and underappreciated. One night he is visited by a humanoid frog (voiced by Pierre Földes), who asks him to help slay a giant worm living under Tokyo, one who’s rage threatens to destroy the city.
If it wasn’t at all obvious from this very brief description of the stories, Földes’ film plays in the realms of Murakami’s magical realism. You could take Katagiri’s Frog-based adventure as the signs of a schizophrenic episode, or just accept it on face value and roll with it. That’s kind of the whole basis of Komura’s journey, who plays out a series of episodes while reacting to things around him.
While searching for his cat, named Noboru Watanabe as a deep dish reference for Murukami fans, he meets a young girl sitting in the backyard. Directly influenced by ‘The Thieving Magpie’ section of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, it constantly plays with perception, dancing in and out of dreams.
Yet more than anything, Földes’ film is anchored by the human relationships that Murakami dissects so well. Through flashbacks and asides, we get to know more about Kyoko’s motivations, for example. There’s an entire side-story about Komura and a boy possibly suffering from unexplained hearing loss. Later, an incident known as ‘The Bear Story’ is both a fascinating character study and erotically charged at the same time.
The laser focus on these people is reflected in the animation style as well. While the main characters are fully animated in a simple but effective style, and the backgrounds have a firm and detailed sense of place, other characters are literally just lines and transparencies. It’s almost like everyone else, including some of the buildings, are merely ghosts.
Földes’ style is a floating world, sometimes juxtaposing his fantastic scenarios against realistic movement. The animation team used live action reference for every shot, 3D model the character’s heads, with the animators then adding in the facial expressions later. The result is sometimes uncanny, especially for the character of Frog. His humanoid arm and leg movements are unnerving when contrasted with the head of an amphibian.
The original English language track is a bit of a mixed bag. We start with the assumption that the actors are responding to the arm’s length distance these characters have from the world. Yet there are some line readings that are seemingly so terrible that our audience inadvertently burst into laughter, although some of this might also have something to do with the particular way that Murakami writes some of the female characters in particular.
There’s a repeated line in the film that seems to connect many of these threads together. “No matter where you go, you can’t get away from yourself.” Which is the thought that’s lingered with me long since leaving the cinema. BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN is, by its very nature, a puzzle that has no answer. Like the feline Noboru Watanabe, it exists both inside the box and outside. A narrative Schrödinger if ever there was one.
2022 | Canada, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands | DIRECTOR: Pierre Földes | WRITER: Pierre Földes (based on stories by Haruki Murakami) | CAST: Ryan Bommarito, Shoshana Wilder, Marcelo Arroyo | DISTRIBUTOR: Sydney Film Festival 2023 | RUNNING TIME: 108 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 7-18 June 2023 (SFF 2023)
