European Films

Wong Kar Wai’s English-language debut My Blueberry Nights opened the 60th edition of the Cannes Film Festival today. The film represents both a series of changes for the director -- a new language, a new country, a new director of photography and a singer with no acting experience in the lead role in the form of Norah Jones -- but at the same time the director also relies heavily on what makes a film a Wong Kar Wai film, including the signature abundance of neon-lights and that dreamy atmosphere that have become a director’s trademark. Since it is in English and co-stars Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz, the film will probably be a bigger international hit than his previous efforts, but artistically speaking My Blueberry Nights is not a step forward but rather a step back.

 

The best films of Hong Kong-based director Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love, 2046) are both post-coital bliss beautiful and disquietingly precise in locating emotions and sensations that remain evanescent for all but a very select group of directors. In the first scenes of My Blueberry Nights -- in which Norah Jones’ Elizabeth finds consolation for her heartbreak in the left-over Blueberry pies served at Jude Law’s Russian café -- everything seems on track for, if not the best, at least a very good Wong Kar Wai film. But before the half-hour mark Elizabeth leaves for a road trip and during that trip the film has problems in keeping everything in focus despite an overabundance of talk and visual cues.

 

The naïve Elizabeth’s grand tour of the US is a neatly mapped out route of instructive encounters with various strangers, including a warring ex-couple played by the always reliable David Strathairn (Good Night and Good Luck) and a ravishing Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener), and a gambling girl played by Natalie Portman that is essentially a variation on the character she played in Closer (which also co-starred Law). 

 

These encounters are interesting subjects in themselves, but never feel like an inherent part of the story, and the director and co-screenwriter Lawrence Block’s tendency to underline, double underline and then circle and highlight their points place these encounters in a different universe -- namely, that of the instructive moral tales -- than My Blueberry Nights’ opening scenes and the director’s previous films.

 

Could it be that the director feels less certain he gets his message across in a language that is not his? Voice overs from several characters are used to make explicit what should ideally have been inferred from what transpires on screen. “I wonder how you will remember me,” Jones’s character writes to Jude Law while on the road, “as the girl of the blueberry pies or the one with a broken heart?”

 

Visually, the film is pure Wong Kar Wai. The director again collaborated with production designer William Chan Suk Ping (also the editor of the film), and cinematographer Darius Khondji faultlessly picked up where Christopher Doyle (with whom the director previously collaborated) left of. The director’s dreamy aesthetics are so much part and parcel of the film that when the audience gets a point-of-view shot from a faulty security camera, the image is not grainy, snowy or striped but separated into successions of warm colour baths.

 

The signature shot of the film is an overhead shot of Jude Law and Norah Jones kissing that will have romantic females (and some males) melt -- but here again, the film overdoes it by cutting to a close-up of a piece of pie with melting ice cream on top. It is as if Wong Kar Wai not only wanted to make a film in English, but also wanted to visually put in the contents of the subtitles his Chinese-language films had on screen as well, afraid that people might otherwise get lost if they can’t double-check.

 

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