Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. 1942.

Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. 1942. Art Institute of Chicago.

 

Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights sparks a mul­ti­tude of thoughts for me. Already an admirer of his pre­vi­ous work, I came to the film with some minor dis­com­fort in need of assuag­ing. Funny thing about that dis­com­fort. I didn’t even real­ize I had it until I was well into the film. And some of that real­iza­tion made me uncom­fort­able with the dis­com­fort itself.

Part of it was because the film is so beau­ti­ful on the sur­face. Wong Kar-​​wai has always been a mas­ter of color, hue, sat­u­ra­tion, fram­ing and time. He has always been able to make the pas­sage of time a visual event, vis­ceral, some­times wist­ful, often a char­ac­ter within the story itself. Time moves across his screen, changes up, slows down, speeds up again. Blurs. Trails. Comes into focus. Then stops again. And he has always cho­sen actresses who can make the cam­era love them. Wong Kar-​​Wai may be, among cur­rent direc­tors, the best at pre­sent­ing female beauty.

But it was the aspect of new lan­guage and locale in this film that stumped me the most. Wong Kar-​​wai was born in China in 1958, then moved with his fam­ily to Hong Kong at the age of five. He went from speak­ing Mandarin to hav­ing to learn Cantonese almost overnight, uti­liz­ing count­less hours at the movies to help that tran­si­tion. Becoming a film­maker almost seems like fate, given his story. Perhaps mak­ing yet another tran­si­tion was fate as well.

My Blueberry Nights is his first movie in English, and the first movie of his I’ve seen with pre­dom­i­nantly American actors. I loved his ear­lier films set in Asia (Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love, and 2046), star­ring great Chinese and Japanese actors. Even though I needed sub­ti­tles to under­stand the dia­logue, I felt at home with the world on the screen, con­nected in a strange way, while another part of me sensed the for­eign­ness and was even more involved. And the sound­track just height­ened the effect. Wong Kar-​​wai, like Haruki Murakami, is a Jazz afi­cionado, and a lover of American and British pop tunes and clas­sic stan­dards. He mixes this in bril­liantly with his story lines. It’s all the more effec­tive given the prove­nance of the music and the set­tings of his films. The con­trast. The jar­ring jux­ta­po­si­tion that looks and sounds so smooth on the screen.

This time, how­ever, the music would still be American and European, but the set­ting would be, too. New York, Memphis, parts of Nevada and California. No broad cul­tural con­tra­pun­tal. No delight­fully jar­ring mix.

But music was still a key, as was the lan­guage, and I found that it didn’t take that long for it to begin to work for me. It didn’t take that long before I didn’t care any­more that I wasn’t watch­ing another of his visu­ally stun­ning films set in Asia, with Asian stars speak­ing Chinese. Once the movie cre­ated its own world, it’s own set of rules and tim­ing, I set­tled into that world, and Wong Kar-Wai’s artistry did the rest.

Music prob­a­bly started the whole project. The film stars Norah Jones, a gifted singer/​songwriter, the daugh­ter of Ravi Shankar, and yet another embod­i­ment of cul­tural change, fusion, tran­si­tion and its beau­ti­ful effects. Wong Kar-​​wai decided to do a film with her as the star long before he started mak­ing it. A pre­vi­ous short film of his was the basis, but Norah Jones was the rai­son d’être. It would be her first star­ring role. Another gifted singer/​songerwriter, Cat Power (Chan Marshall), stars as Jude Law’s ex-​​girlfriend, Katya, and two of her songs grace the soundtrack.

Which brings us closer to the story itself. I know, it took me long enough!

So, we have Norah Jones as Elizabeth, wan­der­ing into a lit­tle café in New York, owned by Jude Law, who plays Jeremy. She’s a bit fraz­zled, tired, and upset after dis­cov­er­ing her boyfriend ate at that diner with another woman. There’s some nice sym­bol­ism regard­ing a bowl of lost keys and Elizabeth returns to the diner a few more times. She and Jeremy strike up a rather guarded friend­ship that nei­ther really under­stands ini­tially. Though Jeremy is quicker to sense its pos­si­bil­i­ties. Blueberry pie and ice cream mix with the won­der­ful visual palette of the film. The eyes get their dessert often enough.

Elizabeth soon decides that she needs to leave New York. This is often a move peo­ple make after a trau­matic breakup, and prob­a­bly accounts for most of the great geo­graph­i­cal dis­cov­er­ies through the cen­turies. Columbus, no doubt, was jilted prior to ask­ing for funds for his famous voy­age. Brendan the Navigator was thrown out of his house by his Irish girl­friend after com­ing home too late one too many times. Leif Erickson’s girl­friend did the same thing to him. And Marco Polo left Italy for the Orient because he for­got his mistress’s birth­day three years in a row.

Elizabeth becomes Lizzie and Beth and other vari­a­tions of her full name along the way, and meets David Strathairn, Rachel Weitz and Natalie Portman as she moves west. She writes post­cards to Jeremy back east, telling him about her new acquain­tances, their lives, their tragedies, choos­ing a form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with­out the risk of direct responses in the moment. The story within the story involv­ing David Strathairn’s char­ac­ter, Arnie, a police­man by day and a drunk by night, is mov­ing and could reside inside the paint­ing above. His ex, Sue Lynne (Rachel Weitz), left him for another, per­haps many oth­ers, and he can’t let go. Oddly enough, either can she, even though she’s mostly gone. Wong Kar-​​Wai gets a lot out of small moments and decep­tively sim­ple plot lines. There is a uni­ver­sal­ity in play that is never over­taken by the strong color mix, the music, or the idio­syn­crasies of the characters.

But it is Lizzie’s time with Natalie Portman’s char­ac­ter, Leslie, the gam­bling daugh­ter of a gam­bler, that really sets the stage for her to fig­ure most things out. They briefly play a much milder ver­sion of Thelma and Louise, do a sun-​​drenched road trip to a hos­pi­tal to see Leslie’s father, and then part com­pany, strangely enough, on the upswing.

I liked the film. A lot. I don’t think it’s as strong as 2046, which is a mas­ter­piece, as far as I’m con­cerned. Nor is it quite as good as the oth­ers I men­tion above. But it gets to you, creeps up on you, becomes more than just a pleas­ant diver­sion with beau­ti­ful visu­als. It’s really quite won­der­ful in the way it’s framed, the begin­ning and the end, the lost keys and the open doors and the let­ting go and the mov­ing on. What seems too sim­ple at first glance becomes not a mat­ter of sim­plic­ity at all but of lived and loved uni­ver­sals. And, though it is far from “real­is­tic”, there is a deeper truth to the movie that helps us let go, move on, give up our keys and go through yet another door on our way to .…

 

 

 

 

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