Give me a break or "I could do with a fag"

Another image of woman smoking is as a strong feminine character, this image is steeped in seductive posing that smoulders with sexual promise, the impenetrability of that promise and the image of a woman who will not stand for a domineering patriarchal society any longer. This image heralds from the mid twentieth century when women became a genuine consumer market for the tobacco companies and also when this image of women popped from the cigarette case of Marlene Dietrich.

In Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott – and I am here talking of the 1991 directors cut – there is a scene early on when the Blade Runner Deckard interviews (Void-comp test) Rachael, ostensibly this is to see how the test reacts to humans, as opposed to the usual subject matter that are Replicants. As anyone who has seen the film knows, it is made explicit at the conclusion of the interview that Rachel is a Replicant, although she believes she is Human but suspects that she may be otherwise. So it is clear that Rachael is a woman caught in a precarious position of not knowing what she, Replicant or Human, endangered or simply normal.

At the out-set and during the interviews duration we are lead to believe that Rachel in human. She appears at first glance to be a strong and determined woman albeit with innocent inchoate eyes that are slightly cold, her dress is a clean fusion of 1930’s, where the cut of her clothing is fitted to her body’s curves, and the hypothesised synthetic styles of a Si-Fi 2019. But after a marathon interview Deckard concludes that Rachel is a Replicant to which the head of Tyrell Corporation replies that she suspects that she is.

During the course of the interview Rachel had been smoking and smoking played a large aesthetic part in the scene, not only did it help cultivate film noir styling at one point an edit was cut with an eddy of smoke as the segue. A question as to the motivation for Rachel’s smoking is lighten up if we consider why women smoke, at first glance Rachel smoking is indicative of a strong, emancipated and seductive woman in control of her situation but we also know that Rachel suspects that she is a Replicant and that the interview she is taking aims at determining her true nature. She has something to hide no doubt, so is her smoking more of a crutch for her emotions to help mask her inner most secret or a weapon of seduction?

This is an interesting little scene as it is a polemic mash-up, stylistically with the mingling of film noir and Si-Fi, the boundaries of the human and non-human and of particular interest here Rachel’s smoking, is she in command, as we are lead to believe, or is she for the duration of the interview trying to mask something. The implementation of the cigarette devise is wonderfully subversive. We the viewers are seduced and led, with the scripting of signifiers, up the garden path with the line of thought that Rachael is a strong and seductive woman and her smoking being the obvious tool of expressing this, but this garden path does a u-turn at the conclusion of the scene where we learn that Rachel was in fact trying to mask an inner secret in what in short amounts to an interrogation. It is in this light that the smoking signifier has now morphed into one of emotion support: an ever diminishing crutch, which by the scenes end can no longer support what Rachel desires to conceal.

A berry from North America

My blueberry nights:

My Blueberry Nights is Wong Kar Wai’s first English language film and is also his most accessible, it is a straight forward film about living without loved ones and attempting to move forward. It uses the road movie genre as a vehicle for telling the story of a young, heartbroken and innocent woman Elizabeth (Norah Jones, in her first acting role), but this gener is more of a backdrop to the old Wong Kar Wai themes of searching for love, issues of alienation and probing memories. It is perhaps a lack of understanding on Kar Wai’s part that the road movie theme of travelling the frontiers of experience and identity is not played out more; he is also a stranger in a strange land.

Elizabeth starts to hang out late at night in a New York diner run by Jeremy (Jude Law) who has his own backstory of loss. His way of dealing with it is to stay put and things will come to him, whilst Elizabeth decides that she must take to the road and learn of life, love and loss. So she sets off, along the way she spends time in Memphis where she meets a separated couple who tried to drink themselves back into love, but alas for the sultry and seductively wasted Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz) even this did not inspire and compel her to stay with Arnie (David Strathairn), who subsequently carries on drinking each night and is a sad story of a heart broken man. It is during this story sequence that the song ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ by Ottis Redding is heard repeatedly and we can infer what we will from this, but it further stresses the importance of music in the storytelling technique deployed by Kar Wai in his films.

Earlier in the film the track ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ with its themes of nocturnal longing and memories dancing a mournful tango, first heard in Mood For Love and again in 2046, rears its head; with the characters on screen swaying to similar moods as in earlier films. Could the use of this piece again be a thread that constitutes the three films representing a trilogy of sorts? But whatever the case, what is apparent with this first English language film by Kar Wai is that he still likes to cast musicians in a role. Along with Jones, Cat Power/Chan Marshall pops in for a cameo along with her aching recollection of a song ‘The Greatest’.

From New Orleans Elizabeth is on the road again working in a casino and meeting up with Leslie (Natalie Portman) who teaches her some lessons and takes her along for a rids to Las Vegas. All this plays out in a quite un-Kar Wai straight, linear time narrative and as such there is not any jigsaw pieces of time to fit together, the narrative is all laid out in front for the viewer to see. The film only once cuts back to the past: it’s only for a fleeting, towards the end of the film and serves more as garnish. The remembering of a moment from the past that has been built into a memorial by the memory is lacking in this film, in previous films a memory was probed repeatedly and its nuances revealed a sensual bounty. The one cut back serves only to tell fleetingly that Elizabeth didn’t want to be the person she was anymore, but it is safe to assume that this point was a given and didn’t need to be explicitly stressed.

Where My Blueberry Nights lets down is in the style department: stylistically it’s quite weak compared with what we have come to expect from a Wong Kar Wai film. It may look better than most films, especially with the neon lighting of night-time highlighting the ache of the heart, but, gone is his long-term Kar Wai cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s tight angles and dreamy hand held camera work and the film looks pedestrian without it. Also it would appear that the story for the film was quite advanced during production and it wasn’t cut together in the editing room as is often the case with a Wong Kar Wai film. Cut from the film are many of the tricky narrative structures of repeating a moment to explore its differences; like watching undulating ripples cast from the coins we cast into the wishing-well of time.

Given that Kar Wai’s films are generally quite literary – the calligraphy in Ashes of Time and the writing in the Mood for Love and 2046 – My Blueberry Nights is a bit light and it’s hard for postcards to pass as literature. But then again, perhaps this film was something of a cinematic postcard sent to us by Wong Kar Wai.