Several things blended together for me today like ice cream and warm pie. And Brandi. And Day for Night. And a call from North Carolina about a trip to Italy.

In the bright sun­shine, think­ing again about the night scenes in My Blueberry Nights. At night, think­ing about the bright sun­shine in the Thelma and Louise sec­tion of Wong Kar-wai’s film, while I lis­tened to Brandi Carlile’s The Story and won­dered if he knew any­thing about her. Because her music fit much of that, and her own per­sona fit Natalie Portman’s char­ac­ter, some­what. There is some­thing uniquely American about a tomboy­ish girl with a gui­tar, singing lone­some songs, throw­ing in a yodel or two for the desert, hop­ing for more than echoes. Brandi Carlile sings about friend­ship, about offer­ing friend­ship and sup­port, pow­er­fully, but from a deep and lonely place. The kind of friend­ship and loy­alty only the lonely can really touch.

Not the queen of the prom. Not the head cheer­leader. Perhaps just the guardian of the highway.

Her song, “Happy”, strikes me as most in tune with My Blueberry Nights. Elizabeth (Norah Jones) sends her post­cards back east to Jeremy (Jude Law). Brandi Carlile sends a musi­cal post­card back home as well. And the tone, the way she sings it, add depth and con­tra­dic­tions to the lyrics:

I’m happy
Can’t you see
I’m alright
But I miss you Amber Lee

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My Blueberry Nights was ulti­mately about that. Intimate moments between strangers who lack happy, gig­gling hordes of friends. Single peo­ple cling­ing to other sin­gle peo­ple, alone in the midst of cities and deserts. Losing them some­times. Not want­ing to let go. It’s harder to let go of one per­son when no one else is left. Easier to let go when life pul­sates all around you and you actu­ally fit in with that pul­sat­ing life.

But Art can give dig­nity to all of that. To be alone together. And music tells the story and lifts that story above the banal, the every­day, and then grounds it deep within the earth. Yes, Brandi Carlile is earthy. And that’s a good thing. A very good thing. As good as it gets, in fact. And, like the earth, she sings of pain and mis­ery and over­com­ing that and how she is dying to be closer to her lover and her friend. I find myself root­ing hard for her, hop­ing she’ll find her way back home again, so she can sing about that instead, about home­com­ings. The look in her lover’s eyes when she weaves her nos­tal­gia into sweet acoustic notes. From a bet­ter place, an end­ing wor­thy of Hollywood or Hong Kong.

But start­ing from that happy place, where every­one is pop­u­lar and sat­is­fied is … bor­ing. Not sure why, but you have to go through the muck and the dust and the loss and the lone­li­ness to actu­ally savor con­nec­tions between peo­ple … to respect those con­nec­tions … to cher­ish them. Contrast and con­text are everything.

Day for Night. That was another part of my Blueberry Monday. The great Francois Truffaut film. Perhaps the best film ever made about film­mak­ing. Aside from the obvi­ous meta-​​aspects of a movie about a movie, it also dealt with lone­li­ness and the way we humans too often expect far more of one another than makes much sense, given our propen­sity for bum­bling and self­ish­ness. And chaos. Selfish, chaotic bum­bling. And masks. Which is nat­ural in a film about actors, star­ring actors. With many faces. We can’t see through them to the other side, usu­ally. But we can count on see­ing replace­ments. New faces on old faces and so on.

The title itself comes from a tech­nique used to save a buck or two in the process. Filming night scenes dur­ing the day­time, using fil­ters and other mech­a­nisms. The audi­ence sees one thing while the film­mak­ers see another. Of course, the entire process is like that. Sleight of hand writ large. All the while one of the leads, Alphonse, played by Jean-​​Pierre Leaud, runs around the film set ask­ing if women are magic. Everyone’s magic, of course, in the movies.

On the film set of the film within the film, a soap opera rages, with new cou­plings and bro­ken hearts, and every­one seems to want to leave for some­place else. It’s amaz­ing the film ever gets made. Especially when tragedy befalls one of the leads. The Play’s the Thing. The show must go on, and all of that.

Contrasts: Truffaut is a mas­ter, and Day for Night is one of his best films. But I found myself com­par­ing the visu­als — the col­ors, the tex­tures, the com­po­si­tion of each frame — with Wong Kar-wai’s work and found it want­ing. Obviously, both direc­tors have a dif­fer­ent aes­thetic and con­cen­trate on dif­fer­ent things. And the direc­tor from China made his film more than thirty years after Truffaut made his, and had all the advan­tages of new pro­duc­tion tech­niques because of that. Still … from a purely artis­tic point of view, I pre­fer WKW. Luckily, I don’t have to choose between the two.

I also found myself won­der­ing how Brandi Carlile would react to that crazy crew and the fast pace of life in Day for Night. My guess is she would grab her gui­tar and hit the high­way, head west into the sunset.

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