Eighteen years ago, Tran Anh Hung became the first—and so far only—Vietnamese filmmaker to receive a best foreign-language Oscar nomination for his first feature, the languidly atmospheric The Scene of Green Papaya—even the title arouses the senses. It grossed nearly $2 million in the U.S., but since then, his films haven’t been as widely seen here.

Clearly he has since moved in other directions, now adapting the international 1987 bestseller by Haruki Murakami, “a nostalgic story of loss and sexuality,” according to the press notes. His luminous first film was delicately observant; his new one, grainy and opaque. Though set in the late 1960s among students at the University of Tokyo, teenage hormones creep along, stuck in first gear. There’s plenty of sex and insanity, storywise, but the director takes a deliberately minimalistic and monochromatic approach, especially in the direction of his lead actor.

The film begins with a teenaged trinity: the handsome leader of the pack, Kizuki (Kengo Kora), his girlfriend, Naoko (Rinko Kikuchi—remember her from Babel?), and his best friend Watanabe, the film’s narrator. The carefree tone abruptly changes within the first 10 minutes. Kizuki efficiently closes a garage door and proceeds to kill himself by carbon monoxide poisoning. His thoroughness and calmness shocks—one of the few sensations the film arouses. Watanabe begins a new life as a college student in Tokyo, and a year later, he runs into Naoko. Their friendship changes during a party for two celebrating her 20th birthday when she loses her virginity to him, but Kizuki hovers in the background. You can chalk up Watanabe’s behavior to his inexperience, but only the most naïve would ask a lover why she didn’t ever sleep with her last boyfriend. Needless to say, she vanishes from his life.

The timeline jumps a bit ahead after Watanabe hears from Naoko again and visits her in a bucolic sanitarium. The connection to her mental meltdown can be inferred by the earlier suicide—and likewise, Watanabe’s bout with self-mutilation. However, she appears more lucid and certainly has more energy than he. During his infrequent visits to Reiko, they resume their affair in the open fields, with the camera intrusively in their faces. No matter how up close the lens scrutinizes Watanabe and Naoko (you can even see their pores), the effect doesn’t heighten the audience’s connection with them. If anything, it’s like watching strangers make out right in front of you.

Watanabe remains a blank slate while the female cast emote circles around him. Like the audience, the women have to project onto him what remains invisible. Kenichi Matsuyama’s performance as Watanabe is so understated that he plays hard to get with the audience. For the convenience of plot, women are drawn to him, somehow choosing him for a partner. Or is it also a male fantasy, that of the awkward guy surrounded by beautiful, sexually available women? Physically a dullard, he walks with his arms stiffly to his side, sleepwalking from one entanglement to another. The painful longings of first-everything (love, sex, and experience with death) that the part calls for is missing in action. However, Kiko Mizuhara stands out as Midori, an aggressive flirt who is as inquisitive as Naoko is retiring. Her frankness belies her school girl appearance and shakes the film out of its stupor with her bold questioning: what do guys think about when they masturbate? Well, in Watanabe’s case, who knows?

Part of the viewer’s alienation is due to the script, which declares the students’ intentions that would otherwise be undetectable. Granted, background from the novel has been expunged from the screenplay, but only thanks to Naoko’s torrent of a monologue do we know that she doesn’t know how to relate to people since Kizuki’s death, and that Watanabe’s presence will be “painful” for her, a reminder of her guilt from her fear that she may have been a reason for Kizuki taking his life.

Though the bedroom fumblings and couplings occur in a time of enormous societal change, these middle-class youth live within a fairly placid bubble. Politics are strictly personal. As the title hints, there’s a whiff of pop culture: Naoko’s roommate in the sanitarium sings an acoustic version of the Beatles’ 1965 sitar-driven pop song, and it’s heard again during the closing credits. For those brief moments, you sense what’s like to be young and free-spirited.