My Blueberry Nights

[KLAXXON]

After the critical success of IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE and 2046, Wong Kar Wai assembles an impressive cast for his first English-language film. To escape heartbreak, Elizabeth (singer Norah Jones) wanders across America, making money and friends as a waitress in various spots throughout the country. MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS also features the talents of Jude Law, David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz, and Natalie Portman.



Wong Kar-Wai fans will be divided over the merits of My Blueberry Nights, an episodic, rambling and only fitfully successful attempt to transfer the stylised atmospherics and dream-like languor of In The Mood For Love and 2046 to an American setting. Norah Jones is Elizabeth, a newly dumped waitress whose impulsive road trip across the US brings her into contact with other lost souls with their own romantic problems. Like Jude Law's Mancunian accent, however, the low-key result never quite rings true.

Law plays Jeremy, a British cafe owner in New York who consoles Jones's lovelorn waif with kind words and free desserts. His reward is to receive postcards from her cross-country odyssey, which sees her encounter an alcoholic Memphis cop (David Strathairn), his cheating wife (Rachel Weisz, vampily introduced in almost parodic slow-motion) and, later, a Nevada gambler (Natalie Portman) who dupes her out of her travel money. Passive to the point of inertia, Elizabeth has little impact on the people she meets or their tragic lives. But the heartbreak she witnesses at least puts her own into perspective, something Jones conveys with an unforced naturalism that helps offset her acting inexperience.


"Sometimes the tangible distance between two persons can be quite small but the emotional one can be miles," Kar-Wai explains in a director's statement. "My Blueberry Nights is a look at those distances, from various angles." For all its delicious moments, though, you can't help feeling there are a couple of ingredients missing from this frustratingly insubstantial confection.




Wong Kar Wai makes films for blueberry nights. Long, melancholic evenings when our arms have no one to embrace, our hearts ache with fruitless desire, the words "if only" keep punctuating our thoughts. Curled up on the sofa, comfort food beside us, the cold darkness of winter outside: that's the time to watch the Shanghai-born director's lush, romantic films such as, most recently, In the Mood for Love and 2046. They are mood pieces rather than dramas, ambient rather than action-led. They give us a licence to be still and to wallow in reverie.

   
Dreamy: Norah Jones in Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights
My Blueberry Nights offers us more of the same, though whether to the same haunting and rapturous effect is open to question. It's his first English-language picture, as well as the first for some time not to be photographed by Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle. Co-scripted by crime novelist Lawrence Block, it features Norah Jones, in her acting debut, as Elizabeth, a young woman trying to get over the pain of being cheated on by her boyfriend. Late one evening, she visits a New York café staffed by expat Mancunian Jeremy (Jude Law) and hands him the keys to her former lover's apartment.

He places them in a jar for safekeeping, tells her stories about the broken hearts of other customers whose keys are in the jar and feeds her blueberry pie before she conks out on the counter. Eventually, she decides to take control of her life, or at least to escape the source of her misery, by taking a bus across the States. In Memphis she works as a waitress and a barmaid, listening to the stories of bar hounds and befriending Arnie (David Strathairn), an alcoholic cop who cannot accept that his estranged wife Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz) will never return.

Later, Elizabeth moves to Nevada, to a casino where the boundary between day and night is blurred, and where she meets Leslie (Natalie Portman), a gambler whose ballsy manner betrays her complicated relationship with her father. They drive along majestic state highways, bonding like a nascent Thelma and Louise, and slowly reach the point when they can work out who they are and how they can move their lives on.

The stories of these characters, full of estrangement, recrimination and bruised emotions, are all similar. So are the cities through which Elizabeth moves. Narratives and places are secondary to the dreamy, bitter-sweet tone Wong is so keen to evoke, and with which, like a scent one might spray on too liberally, he saturates every scene.

Every shot is exquisite. Assisted by production designer William Chang and cinematographer Darius Khondji, the screen becomes liquid with floating, shimmering colours: steamy glass tattooed with attractive typefaces; inky-blue Manhattan skies, sunflower-yellow neon store signs, the electric-green carriages of hurtling subway trains. A close-up of sleeping Elizabeth's lips, slightly parted and coated in a tiny drizzle of cake, almost invites you to reach forward and lick them.

Sometimes this absorption in texture veers towards the precious. And some of the shots - the sheen of an open-top car, a close-up of a woman's feet - are too reminiscent of advertisements in first-class cabin magazines. The scenes in which Elizabeth drives across America are the weakest; Wong is more a master of interiors, capable of charging domestic walls, doors and ceilings with emotion in the same way he gives depth to the clenched, anguished people who are stuck within, behind and below them.

Jones is never going to win any acting awards, but she's surprisingly effective in the lead role, improving as the film, most of which was shot chronologically, goes on. With her slightly moony features, and a neck so small it recalls that of Charlene Tilton in Dallas, she's rather enchanting to look at. She lacks the poise and stillness of professional performers, and this works to her advantage, suggesting a coltish innocence that will mature over the course of her encounters.

Law, bigger-haired than usual, and at times guilty of frantic mugging, ladles up a wide-boy charm that leaves you longing for Tony Leung and his infinitely more subtle appeal. Fans of the Natalie Portman drinking game in which one downs a glass every time she bursts into tears, something she seems always to do in her films, will have to wait a while for alcoholic relief, but they can amuse themselves with her impersonation of Erin Brockovich in a bad wig.

The strongest performances are from Chan Marshall (aka singer Cat Power), who turns in a beguiling cameo as Jeremy's former lover Katya, and whose smoky torch song The Greatest is used to lovely effect on the soundtrack; and from Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck), whose grief seems altogether more visceral than those of the other actors.






Jude Law ...  Jeremy
Norah Jones ...  Elizabeth
Chad R. Davis ...  Elizabeth's Boyfriend (as Chad Davis)
Katya Blumenberg ...  Girlfriend
John Malloy ...  Diner Manager
Demetrius Butler ...  Male Customer
Frankie Faison ...  Travis
David Strathairn ...  Ofcr. Arnie Copeland
Adriane Lenox ...  Sandy
Rachel Weisz ...  Sue Lynne Copeland
Benjamin Kanes ...  Randy
Cat Power ...  Katya (as Chan Marshall)
Michael Hartnett ...  Sunglasses
Natalie Portman ...  Leslie
Michael May ...  Aloha



http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765120/



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