What becomes of the brokenhearted... when they emigrate? Wong Kar-Wai goes in search of America

Strewn throughout My Blueberry Nights are certain carefully chosen mementoes, fetishized objects charged with maintaining the simmering fevers of the brokenhearted, who pretty much constitute the entire populace of this swooning New York to Memphis to Nevada and back road movie, a sort of love letter to American folly and wanderlust that marks the English language debut of beloved Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai. The objects include unclaimed keys, unpaid tabs, poker chips, videotapes and postcards. Each signifies what is very much an idea of longing. I could describe one to you, that is, the idea of one, entirely apart from the context of the movie itself, and you’d likely feel charmed.

Yet the affection bestowed upon these tokens of lost love is indicative of a larger tendency to embrace the flatly tokenistic in My Blueberry Nights, a movie whose characters all seem to be the lovingly contrived product of one or two charming ideas: the cop with the absconded wife he first met when he stopped her for drinking and driving, who now gets drunk every night in celebration of his last night of drinking before driving precariously home; the transplanted Brit who came to the US to run marathons but now just runs an all-night diner; the spunky young gambler who’ll stake everything at the tables but can’t trust her mentor/father enough to believe him when he calls to say he’s dying. This is great raw material for stirring little four-minute soul songs or country songs or Tom Waits songs, but not quite the stuff of richer, more involving movies, of conflicted emotions and accumulated experience transformed into some sort of story that resonates as an impression of life.

My Blueberry Nights debuted at Cannes 2007 to, at best, lukewarm reception. The disappointment was no doubt enhanced by the tremendous praise usually showered upon Wong, whose intoxicatingly melancholy, formally sumptuous In the Mood for Love so dazzled even the most jaded filmlovers—the evidence includes its cracking of the top 20 in filmmaker/critic Paul Schrader’s recent and much-discussed film canon, the only movie from the last 30 years to do so. (And you can read Schrader's remarkable piece on canons here.) As one of his legion of admirers, long before I was able to see it I started to kind of dread My Blueberry Nights, as the notion of a masterful stylist from foreign lands coming to the US to make a mythical American road movie where everything feels like empty kitsch Americana sounded way too much like the formula that’s made legendary German director Wim Wenders’ later work (ie: The End of Violence, The Million Dollar Hotel) so hard to take. (Like Wenders, Wong even uses Ry Cooder as his composer.) I guess I wasn’t alone in this dread, since despite the star power of Jude Law to boost its profile, My Blueberry Nights took a full year after its debut to play theatrically in North America, and died a quick death once it did. It’s now available on DVD, and while some of that dread was merited, while the movie is indeed far from Wong’s best work, it’s hardly as bad as it sounds.

Shot by Darius Khondji, with editing and production design from Wong’s steady William Chang, the movie is above all a wildly beguiling construction of imagery. Wong’s predilection to shoot through mirrors and windows is in full effect, with the heavily etched windows of the Soho diner helmed by Jeremy (Law) functioning as a palimpsest, its abundant neon providing a palate of gorgeously blurred garish colours to play with, colours echoed in the flash cuts to close-ups of melting ice cream streaming rivulets of vanilla through a landscape of gooey purple pie. There are countless couples in My Blueberry Nights, but the only one with any sort of future is the pairing of Jeremy and Elizabeth (singer Norah Jones). The actors don’t exude much chemistry, but Wong conveys their potential romance almost entirely through tableau and montage. It doesn’t completely work, but it is, well, extremely beautiful.

Elizabeth meets Jeremy just as she’s getting ditched by another guy, so whatever desire Jeremy ignites in her is put aside while she takes buses all over America in search of herself… and a car. She works in old man bars, greasy spoons and musty casinos in various locales trying to save up enough bread for some wheels, but the people she meets along the way provide the real mileage, like the aforementioned boozer cop (David Strathairn) and his luscious, reckless ex (Rachel Weisz, a older, sexier, more interesting kind of double for Jones) and the card shark/little girl lost (Natalie Portman). Straitharn and Weisz, superb actors both, are kind of stuck with a storyline that sinks into maudlin theatrics pretty fast, while Portman, blonde, full of sass and vaguely reminiscent of a young Jessica Lange, is actually quite fun in the first part of her episode. It’s too bad that the performance linking them all together is Jones’, whose face just seems too girlish and pouty and whose (over)active listening can get annoying. If Wong’s purpose was to get a unique, textured performance from a young American singer, he might have switched Jones with Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power, who besides acting as music supervisor for the movie also enjoys a brief appearance as Jeremy’s ex. I have no idea whether or not Marshall can develop a complex character, but she’s got far more screen presence. 

Co-scripted with crime novelist Lawrence Block, My Blueberry Nights emanates all of the basic elements that make a Wong movie so special, not just with regards to the visual aspects but also his irreverent approach to text (i.e.: tossing it out the window at a moment’s notice) that allows for a more organic-feeling narrative, one encouraged to breathe. The problem arises when these stray elements don’t really add up to something entirely cohesive or emotionally convincing. It would be hugely unadvisable for newcomers to introduce themselves to Wong through this movie, but those already predisposed to his aesthetic should give it a whirl, since for all its flaws it is very much of a piece with his ongoing body of work—which is in itself more cohesive than any single movie enveloped by it.