Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2022)
- Reviewed from the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival.
The work of novelist Murakami Haruki seems to be finding new life on screen with increasing frequency. Lee Changdong’s Burning (2018) revelled in the ambiguity of the source text through the alluring but intentionally opaque performances of its actors, while Hamaguchi Ryusuke expanded one Murakami short story (and drew on several others) for the three-hour Drive My Car (2021). Despite operating in a different medium – animation – with different narrative priorities, director Pierre Földes takes a not dissimilar approach to Hamaguchi, interlinking separate short stories from Murakami’s collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman and folding them into loosely connected vignettes.
Set in Tokyo in 2011, in the wake of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami but before the aftershocks, the film follows its group of characters as – in the words of a giant anthropomorphic frog – another “very big earthquake, even worse than the one that struck last week”, threatens the city. The stories begin together before diverging into separate chapters, their characters connected by nightmare. Two businessmen are haunted by disturbing dreams – of being trapped in stark, collapsing corridors, of being eaten whole by giant worms disguised as commuter trains. These sequences immediately present an interesting visual tension that runs throughout the film, as Földes contrasts the surrealism of these nightmares with the naturalism of its rotoscoped acting. Each tale contains stories within stories, as the existential crisis of each character leads to conversations with others that bring up long anecdotes, references to films, books and more. The Russian doll approach to narrative suits Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, as it visually leans into the surreality often found in Murakami’s stories, visualising his idiosyncrasies by exploring different variations on its art style.
Földes flirts with psychological horror as he conjures different textures, flashbacks bringing with them changes in line and colouring. The film feels malleable and unbound from reality – we see one man drawn through swirling scribbles, the lines then detaching themselves from him and turning into the crest of a wave. Though some of the animation can seem a little rough, for the most part it’s gorgeous, the beautiful layouts and compositions filled with fascinating detail. Translucent lines and rough crosshatched textures throughout the background art give the film both tactility and a touch of ephemerality. It’s an apposite aesthetic for the film’s combination of realist elements and strange visions, historical concerns and waking dreams. The film’s directness and its dry sense of humour – brought out most of all through the editing and tongue-in-cheek superimpositions – make Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman an invigorating translation of prose to the animated form.
► Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is in UK cinemas from Friday 31 March 2023.