Based on the short story “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” (included in “The Elephant Vanishes”) Naoto Yamanaka‘s second adaptation of a Haruki Murakami novel (following “Attack on Bakery”), manages to capture the essence of the story completely, through a rather experimental approach.
A young man passes a young woman in a Harajuku backstreet, immediately thinking that this girl is a 100% match for him. He does not act on his thoughts though, instead proceeding to a cafe, where he discusses the incident with his two friends, who are more interested in whether she had nice ankles or nice breasts, respectively. Both, however, wonder why he did not speak to her. The initial young man comes up with various plots where the two actually meet and talk, in a series of “what if?” scenarios that end with one where they have met as teenagers, fell in love, but decide to split and see if fate brings them together again.
Yamanaka transfers Murakami’s vague, abstract but rather intriguing comments on the screen with gusto, with the concepts of fate and the different ways men perceive women being the main ones. Some liberties have been taken with the original (which I think Murakami never approved actually) but in general, he manages to stay quite close, as the frequent narrative voice occasionally reads passages straight from the book
However, the 11 minute short stands out more for its presentation than its context, as Yamanaka has included stills that are presented in slide-show fashion, stop-motion, film speed manipulation, pixilation, minimal animation, voice over, repeated switching from black-and-white to color or sequences where the protagonists are in color but the background in monochrome. His approach creates an audiovisual chaos that fits the aesthetics of the original to perfection, while the plethora of still photos also induce the movie with the sense of a tour guide to Harajuku. The occasionally frantic editing also works quite well here, while in combination with the mostly classical music, results in many sequences that function as a music video. This whole approach finds its apogee in the ending, where rock’n’roll takes over, closing the short in the most joyful way.
“A Girl She is 100%” may be brief, but the artistry, the originality, and the closeness to Murakami’s work deem it a true gem.
