Review of Burning (2018) by Olivierpiel — 16 Jan 2019

Movie critics seems to have fallen in love with this cinematic adaptation of Murakami. They seem to praise the atmosphere of the film, congratulating themselves in deciphering the metaphores dropped here and there like a little Tom Thumb by the film director, some even philosophizing on the Little/Great Hunger theme brought up by the female protagonist.

Reading all of them, I was left wondering if any had ever read Murakami's work because this author indulges far too much in pseudo-philosophy à la Paulo Coelho or Yann Martel's Life of Pi with immature failed artists trying to find "the meaning of life"! To be fair, the film manages indeed to accurately put on the screen the gently nihilistic, decadent pre-otaku world of Murakami and his world of likeable over-educated dreamy but lazy, passive "sick-of-the-world" Japanese losers (in a way that resembles Wong Kar Wai's Chungking express). He also goes further, by evidently adding a layer of social-political critique of our current materialistic society. This is slightly too much on the nose however and adds to the biggest problem of this film: It's 2 1/2 hour long!! All the scenes could have been cut by 2/3rd and wouldn't have lost much. Many scenes are also totally useless both for plot exposition or the characters development. The second half of the film is almost totally redundant in scene after scene, for no good artistic reason.

Murakami never left me with an impression of art and beauty but rather an unhealthy habit of self-indulgent introspection to justify a lack of will. Compared with the great Japanese masters, Sooseki, Oe or Mishima, his work seemed trite but content of this very fact.

This is the same with this film.

It doesn't add up to much....and definitely won't "leave a lasting impression"as many critics seem to believe.