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.