![]() ![]() ![]() The screen needs to communicate the atmosphere through kinetic action such as dialogue and visuals. It’s the certainty of the written word that makes sure abstract concepts can be embedded in the mundane. Although the characters are just speaking, it’s the transition back and forth from dialogue to narration that rips the story out of the ground. This atmosphere alone proves difficult to adapt. The weird and arbitrary nature of the act of barn burning is normalized as the people in the story address it in a way that makes it so. All thoughts are spoken, which makes the atmosphere more familiar than it should be. The man who he is speaking to has no fear when he asks as to the nature of the eponymous barn burning, either. The main character, who admits to burning barns, is completely open about his obsession. Murakami’s short collection The Elephant Vanishes, in which “Barn Burning” is included, subverts the idiomatic “elephant in the room” by having characters speak their thoughts, as opposed to merely thinking them. There’s this glaring difference, and to me, rather than say which of us is strange, first of all I’d like to clear up just what that difference is. Take this quote from “Barn Burning,” written from the perspective of the story’s protagonist: There’s a reason: in Murakami’s work, emphasis is placed on the mundane aspects of everyday life as opposed to focusing on what may seem to be ostensibly more “interesting.” While Murakami’s mundane doesn’t always offer a quick fix in terms of gratification, it is by no means ordinary his prose can enchant even the most stagnant, passing thoughts. While “Barn Burning,” the short on which Burning is based, isn’t the first of shorts to make it to screen, the film is the first major adaptation of Murakami’s work to have picked up awards (at the Cannes Film Festival, nonetheless) and receive unanimously positive reviews. But unlike such populist, literary titans like Stephen King, filmmakers haven’t reaped his bibliography for big-screen ventures. The critically renowned author is known for books like Norwegian Wood, adapted into a passing 2012 film, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which no one in the film world seems daring enough to attempt, both of which have earned him crossover acclaim in America. With his new film Burning, writer-director Lee Chang-dong embarks on one of modern cinema’s greatest challenges: adapting Japanese author Haruki Murakami. ![]()
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