Film On release a few months ago, Wong Kar-wai’s My Blueberry Nights received a fair few mixed reviews -- many were beguiled by it, but the same criticisms did seem to crop up -- that it lacked substance, that Wong’s style was compromised in its translation to the west and that the performances are contrived with Norah Jones in particular not showing much promise. I can see those points of view -- it isn’t quite as mysterious or oblique at the director's other work, he doesn’t seem to be playing to some of his strengths as he tries to capture American culture and Jones does melt into the background.
Yet it’s a beautiful, luminous, beguiling experience, precisely the kind of film which works best late on a Friday night, when you’re tired but too wired on caffeine to go to sleep, replete with images and incidents of the kind which stay in the memory the following morning, making you grin or shudder. Even as I sit writing this, moments swim through the chemicals in my brain, the kiss which wipes the ice cream from her lips, the pile of returned postcards, the final drink, the celebration of the final drink, the toast, the loss, the win, the to-let sign and I’m mellowing in a way which only really happens after a cocoa and a Madeleine Peyroux album.
Wong’s never been much for complex stories, preferring instead to concentrate on the wreckage of relationships, and that continues here. Jude Law’s Mancunian New York café owner is surprised when a bedraggled Norah Jones appears at his door trying to confirm the infidelity of her boyfriend. Over successive nights she visits and he eventually authenticates the awful truth, then provides solace in the blueberry pie and ice cream which are always left over at the end each day. Before long and before he can tell her how he’s come to feel about her, Norah’s well enough to drift off into an odyssey across America, becoming involved with a spousal dispute in Memphis then a professional gambler in Vegas, keeping Jude abreast of her thoughts and feelings and learning experiences via postcards.
It’s a film about addicts; people who are hooked on solitude and pain, to alcohol and cards, to learning and lying. It’s also not the kind of film for people who like solid copper bottom plots with a beginning, middle and end and a watertight life lesson along the way. It is a road movie, but the destination is contentment. It’s a portemanteau film but with a central character gaining an education but not learning anything she didn’t already know. There are no easy answers, no pat conclusions and like most of Wong’s other films you’re seeing a slithers of some lives, but not everything, you don’t really know these people any better by the end than you did from the first of its ninety minutes.
The reason that Norah Jones doesn’t stand out is that she shouldn’t. Elizabeth’s the kind of person people can talk to, who only now and then has a sense of purpose when she’s pushed to it. Jones's performance is of the kind you’d find in independent cinema in the 90s, not desperately showy, rather naturalistic but with bags of emotion hidden behind the eyes. Sullen for much of the film, it lights up when she smiles, making those occasions explode with emotion. It is true though, that it improves as the film progresses and you might wonder if Wong shot in order, since she clearly finds confidence in the other performers, sparring best with Natalie Portman’s gambler towards the climax. It's intelligent and even better than some actresses who're making their living in the profession.
It is a great cast, though also a ramshackle one. As the warring couple, Strathern is a reliable drunk and Rachel Weisz introduces us to another of her American accents with a focused unpredictability. It’s been suggested that the rest struggle, that perhaps Law and Portman are miscast, but I’ve never really understand what that means in this kind of context. True, if Vin Diesel had played the café owner there might have been a problem, and though Law’s accent wanders like a pissed student trying to work back to the station down Oxford Road in Manchester, he’s able to communicate a kind of guileful tenacity masking loss and loneliness. Similarly, I think this is some of Portman’s best work -- she’s maturing into a great actress and it’s a genuine surprise to find that face gregariously commanding a poker table, only revealing her vulnerability when it best suits her cause.
Two elements of the film‘s style stand out. It’s also one of the best uses of popular music I’ve seen lately in film; the director repeats music within the same vignettes, most clearly when Jude Law is searching for Norah; the repeated opening piano steps of Cat Power’s The Greatest signalling his longing over and over. Wong’s new cinematographer Darius Khondji largely continues the look developed in previous films, with our view of the characters often blocked by furniture or writing on a window pain, only opening out as the film heads off into the desert and a familiarly Fordian landscape, perhaps signalling Jones's emotional freedom. But it’s the jerky effect created through hand cranking during filming which is the most revealing, allowing us glimpses into the souls of the characters, still images dropped in during motion revealing to us the very thoughts they're desperate to hide.
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