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Tran Anh Hung is presenting his new, haunting movie at the Venice film festival

VENICE, Italy (AFP) - The pacing, the blowing wind, the music and other atmospherics all helped create the tension in "Norwegian Wood," says Tran Anh Hung, presenting the haunting movie at the Venice film festival.

Based on a best-selling novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, the story of love, sexuality and loss -- mainly through suicide -- is set in Japan in the volatile 1960s.

"The film is rich in physical variation," the Vietnamese-born Tran told AFP, discussing scenes in which the lead character Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama) paces around an apartment with the troubled Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi), and later tries to keep up with her in a green field.

Watanabe falls in love with Naoko despite her imbalance over losing her sister and boyfriend to suicide.

While promising to wait for Naoko until she overcomes the trauma at a special sanatorium, Watanabe gets deeply involved with another woman, Midori (Kiko Mizuhara), tumbling into romantic confusion.

"In the field scene the conversation is very physical, Naoko is talking about not being able to get aroused with her previous boyfriend," Tran said. "In fact it's a confession, which in church you would do sitting down."

Scenes in which blowing wind competes with the dialogue "also adds tension," Tran, 47, said of a story that in book form "has a very intimate relationship with the reader."

The film adaptation "was not just adapting a story... it was also adapting all the poetic ramifications, all the emotional ramifications that the book provokes in you," said Tran, who won the top prize Golden Lion here in 1995 for "Cyclo".

"I had to find a way to unlock this personal side," Tran said.

Even the language gap -- Tran used interpreters to direct the all-Japanese cast -- was a way to "find a different energy," he said.

©AFP / Vincenzo Pinto

"Norwegian Wood" is based on a best-selling novel by Japanese author Haruki Murakami

And while the sexuality of the film, presented on Thursday, is replete with 1960s overtones, Tran sought to minimise visual references to the era, notably in the clothes, all neutral, even prim.

"We eliminated anything too hippy," he said.

Apart from the emblematic Beatles' song of the title, he shunned familiar tunes from the era, preferring to use "less well-known music but with strong emotional power... mosty to avoid the nostalgic side," Tran told reporters earlier.

"The story could otherwise be seen as something softer, nicer," he said. "Instead it's seen as harsher, crueler because of the music."

The many love scenes in the film are for the most part awkward, with the focus on the lovers' faces.

"I wanted to show the impact on Naoko when she made love with Watanabe. The rest could only distract from what is most important in the film," Tran said.

The Paris-based director had several exchanges with Murakami at the start of the project, but eventually, Tran recalled, the author said: "Do the film you have in mind. All that is needed is for you to make the best film possible."

"Norwegian Wood" is one of 24 films vying for the Golden Lion at the festival, which opened Wednesday and runs through September 11.

©AFP/Illustration

A study reveals that young US women learn and earn more than men

WASHINGTON (AFP) - After years of earning less than their male counterparts, some American women are catching up to and even overtaking men in terms of how much they earn, but only some of them, a study shows.

They are single women in their 20s without children, who live in large cities and work full-time, according to a report by Reach Advisors, a New York-based strategy and research firm focused on emerging shifts in the consumer landscape.

Those young women earn on average eight percent more than men in their age group, but in some cities, like Atlanta in Georgia and Memphis, Tennessee, women earn around a fifth more than men, according to Reach Advisors' analysis of Census Bureau data.

On average, American women who work full-time earn about 80 percent of what men earn.

The report says that one reason young, single women are overtaking men in terms of earnings is because girls are "going to college in droves."

Nearly three-quarters of girls who complete high school go on to university, compared to only two-thirds of boys.

Women are one-and-a-half times more likely than men to graduate from university and to obtain a masters degree or higher, the report says.

Census data released in April showed that women overtook men in terms of holding advanced degrees in 2000, with 58 percent of all US master's degrees or PhDs awarded to women.

As women go further in their education, they are also holding off on getting married and starting a family.

They're not holding off on buying a home, though: the percentage of single women who bought homes for the first time has increased by 50 percent from the 1990s, to 24 percent of all first-time home-buyers in the United States in 2009, the report said.

Families with children, who have driven the market for community developers and home builders since the end of World War II, made up just 23 percent of households in 2009, the report said.

Young, solvent women are also "fueling the expansion of healthier high-margin items" at fast-food restaurants, and sports that have flourished in the past decade have done so because of women, the report said.

Running, for instance, grew by 41 percent over 10 years, and 93 percent of the sport's growth was due to women's participation.

Young men, on the other hand, are ordering significantly more items from the dollar menu at fast-food establishments and men's participation in most sports has remained flat in the past decade, said the report, for which the researchers pored over data from more than 2,000 communities.