By Matt Zoller Seitz
Wong Kar-Wai's films aren't just intoxicating; they're intoxicated. They deploy slow motion, fast motion, freeze-frames and other visual flourishes not to highlight pivotal narrative moments, but to italicize feelings -- some sorrowful or profound, others fleeting, playful, sensual. His frames are packed with chromatic and textural details and often separated from the viewer by environmental scrims (curtains, door frames, windowpanes, human blurs of foreground motion). Wong compounds disorientation by layering images atop each another in a series of luxurious dissolves. He glosses over dramatic housekeeping and fixates on tremors of emotion. His films seem to be struggling to remember themselves. 
Wong's sense of artistic priorities -- his art, period -- is the true subject of My Blueberry Nights. It's spare, relaxed, playful and very, very loose. Coming on the heels of the symphonic, Proustian romantic drama 2046 (arguably his most ambitious movie) and his stunning segment of Eros, "The Hand" (surely his most precise) it's the directorial equivalent of a musician following up back-to-back marquee performances with an after-hours jam session. Wong's band-mates are his composer, Ry Cooder; his cinematographer, Darius Khondji (shooting with very long lenses that give the images a silkscreen quality); an inconsistent but game-for-anything cast, and a soundtrack of typically eclectic, rueful pop songs (including Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness" and Cassandra Wilson's plaintive cover of Neil Young's "Harvest Moon").
In place of a Syd Field-approved three act story, My Blueberry Nights offers a series of moments (some pivotal, others fleeting) in the lives of various, tangentially unrelated characters. The moments are threaded together via the experiences of a New York coffee shop waitress named Elizabeth (Norah Jones), who tries to get over a breakup by living and working in other cities, witnessing and/or participating in other characters' dramas. But Elizabeth's experiences less a dramatic through-line than an emotional echo chamber: a means for Wong to simultaneously explore one character's self-reckoning and a second character's reaction to it. (Every other character seems to have lived more, and suffered more, than Elisabeth has.) 
Throughout, Wong directs like a musician, living for (and in) the moment, collapsing time and space and expanding and deepening feelings. Each section of the film is like a self-contained track spotlighting a different character's hard-won enlightenment. The first half-hour focuses on Elizabeth's burgeoning relationship with a Manhattan coffee shop owner named Jeremy (Jude Law). At first, Elizabeth's feelings and experiences take precedence; then Wong and his co-screenwriter, moonlighting crime novelist Lawrence Block, focus on Jeremy. After Elisabeth moves to Memphis and becomes a bartender, the film refocuses on one of her regular customers, an alcoholic cop, Arnie (David Strathairn) driven to rage by his cheating wife, Sue Lynn (Rachel Weisz); after this thread plays out, the film re-focuses yet again on Sue Lynn's reaction to Arnie's disintegration, and her frank assessment of her marriage and her role in destroying it. Then it shifts emphasis yet again when Elisabeth gets a job as a waitress at a Nevada casino and gets drawn into a probably-scam by a down-on-her-luck gambler named Leslie (Natalie Portman, boasting a deep-fried Southern accent and wearing what appears to be Ann-Margaret's 1980s hand-me-downs). As the movie unreels, Elisabeth and Jeremy go on about their lives; other characters slip in and out, pausing just long enough to illuminate an aspect of existence -- the necessity and impossibility of new beginnings (Arnie), for instance, or selfishness and cruelty's destructive effect on love (Sue Lynn). The film eventually circles back to Elisabeth and Jeremy and implies that they've learned something, or that they should have learned something. But what?
The answer can be found in the construction of My Blueberry Nights, a movie for which the phrase "style is substance" might have been coined. To get philosophical for a moment -- and it's Wong, so why not? -- let's assume, as I think Wong does, that there are two realities. One is scientific, logical, mathematical, quantifiable, or at least we've decided it is; it's the world of anniversaries and birthdays and holidays, years and weeks and minutes, latitudes and longitudes, mile markers and return addresses. The other world -- internal, emotional; the world behind our eyes and ears -- is oblivious to calendars and measurements. It notices what it wants to notice and feels what it wants to feel when it wants to feel it, and ironically -- wonderfully -- it's the place where life actually happens to us, the place where we register experience and collect the visceral sensations we call memories. This is the place where all of Wong's movies occur -- thus the willful scrambling, even obliteration, of comprehensible time and space, and the prizing of images, sounds and fleeting emotions over, well, pretty much everything that commercial narrative cinema tells us is important. A director's choice of what to emphasize tells you what, exactly, he believes is worth paying attention to; in My Blueberry Nights, it's the play of streetlights on a coffee shop window, the layout of a pub interior, the metal-and-neon bustle of a casino floor; the curve of Elizabeth's forehead, nose and chin in close-up, and the improbable ease with which she navigates pavement in heels; the pleasant aural sensation of a country-western song laid atop the murmur of barroom conversation; the distinct textures of a half-full beer glass, a stack of poker chips, a slice of blueberry pie swimming in cream. ("The great fucks that you may have had," asks loquacious salesman Ricky Roma in David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. "What do you remember about them? I don't know. For me, I'm saying, what is is, it's probably not the orgasm. Some broad's forearm on your neck, something her eyes did. There was a sound she made...or, me, lying, in the, I'll tell you: me lying in bed; the next day she brought me café au lait. She gives me a cigarette, my balls feel like concrete. Eh? What I'm saying, what is our life? It's looking forward or it's looking back. And that's our life. That's it. Where is the moment?") 
Am I projecting onto Wong's film and misreading his intentions? I don't think so. When the characters talk, they're less likely to reiterate present-tense goals than to reminisce about the past, project the future or wax philosophical. (Jeremy's appreciation of blueberry pie, which he characterizes as the least-requested but most special dessert on his menu, might be this movie's answer to the pinot noir manifesto in Sideways.) The movie's sections are partitioned by title screens noting elapsed time and distance, but the information is so unrevealing of the characters' predicaments that you might as well be looking at bar tabs or recipes. Nights takes place in New York, Memphis and somewhere in Nevada, yet so much of the action occurs indoors that the whole thing might as well have been made on Hong Kong soundstages. The movie has a keen sense of cultural differences but no sense of place. (In this aspect, Nights faintly evokes Wim Wenders' prescient 1976 feature The American Friend, a international espionage thriller whose final third deliberately confused us as to what city the characters were in -- the better to suggest the blur of life in a globalized era.) The film's last section sets up a make-or-break poker game for which Leslie borrows money from Elisabeth, then cuts away from the outcome of the contest to show Leslie storming out of the casino, defeated and demoralized (the moment of her loss apparently deemed unworthy of note by the director); then the two women go on the road for a non-adventure that accomplishes nothing except to set up Elisabeth's return to New York and her inevitable reunion with Jeremy. ("Wong seems to take no interest at all in settings that have provided great inspiration to many filmmakers," complains Variety film critic Todd McCarthy, never pausing to wonder why that might be.)
There's no sense pretending that My Blueberry Nights is a towering addition to Wong's filmography. The stakes are quite low throughout, and the movie's pace is as boozy-meandering as the tempo of its soundtrack selections. (Cooder's instrumental tracks recall his work on Wenders' melancholy, Sam Shepard-scripted road movie Paris, Texas.) Jones is a stunning camera subject and never less than likable, but she lacks the technique to suggest a complex interior life. Law is, as usual, gorgeous and charming but not especially exciting. Weisz's performance is a touch shrill, her "southern" accent a botch; she only rallies during Sue Lynn's confession. Portman is livelier here than she's been in some time -- the character's brassiness liberates her -- but the role still doesn't quite seem to fit. (Was it written with an older actress in mind?) Of the major players, only Strathairn makes a deep impression; few actors are better at playing men coming to terms with failure. Yet if you're willing to ease into Wong's mindset -- that of a barfly who's in such a good mood that he doesn't care what he's drinking or what's on the jukebox or how many hours are left till closing time -- none of the aforementioned flaws feel like flaws. My Blueberry Nights seems to be unfolding in a world of perpetual night -- one in which the darkness is illuminating. It's an exploration of interiors, geographical and emotional, and it seems acutely alive -- as if the movie itself is a luminous being that has seen the world and survived heartbreak and resolved to savor each remaining second of its existence, however long or short it may be.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Luminous being: My Blueberry Nights
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25 comments:
Dead on.
Thank you Matt. It's a relief to finally read someone who was hit by this film in a similar way I was, but who manages to express it infinitely better.
Your comparison to a late night jam session is perfect and especially appropriate because the film begs to be described in musical terms.
The scorn being heaped upon this film is a little bewildering, particularly from people who claim to like the director.
Wonderfully evocative piece, Matt. Reading it, your words became shots and your sentences scenes. Vintage Wong Kar-Wai, only in prose.
I'll add to the kudos: This is just a beautifully judged, evocative review of a flawed but underrated movie. I'll admit to a weakness for those awkward times when international greats decide to make a movie in America, but I loved watching Wong bring his sensibility to bear on my home country. Makes me feel oddly patriotic.
Lovely review, thank you so much.
Your sympathetic account of Wong's swooning style makes me want to admire this film, but the lyricism of his latest project still seems arbitrarily artificial next to his earlier work, which were more pointedly artificial. The nostalgic slow-motion and obstructed angles make sense in a project like "In the Mood for Love," where they are attached to a liminal historical setting, its decorum, and its cramped living conditions. Without the intimacy of setting present in ItMfL, without that film's colonial melancholy, many of the same devices become merely sentimental, a delicacy fit for aesthetic lotus-eaters. I find myself disappointed that such a promising auteur now seems bent on narcotizing an audience to which he could address ideas as well.
-Dan C.
excellent analysis and commentary on what is admittedly a minor work in the wkw canon - but still a worthy one. my biggest problem with the film is less the filmmaking than the acting. i just think the hk/chinese actors are more adept at conveying the kinds of emotions that wkw is aiming for with more economy and grace.
both you and armond white mentioned that the film was shot on high definition video, but i don't think that's true.
have you read anywhere that this is in fact the case? i'm just curious, cause that would explain the amount of noise in the print.
This came out in January in Taiwan, so I was lucky enough to have seen it some time ago. In many ways it is Wong's least essential film, but it's a nice little low-stakes film. My only concern is that the Wong detractors who think his films seem deep only to Occidental art house types (i.e. the accusation of condescension made by the condescending) will use the near-miss characterizations here to support their points. I'm pretty sure those detractors are wrong, but it does seem that the movie doesn't quite reach the emotional depths of its two precursors, "Chungking Express" and "In the Mood for Love." (The former especially is able to be a surface-level film with real emotional depth, something that "Nights" seems unable to be, Straithairn's performance notwithstanding.)
Law is, as Matt points out, not particularly engaging as an actor, but I thought he was spot-on in the reunion scene with his ex Katya. I recall some people criticizing this scene as bad acting, but I thought Law's discomfort was very effective, and at the very least I recognized the fidgeting and chuckling from my own painful reunions. Maybe we're both right and "bad acting" is the proper analogue for a conversation with someone who has broken your heart.
A lovely piece and I agree with almost every sentiment - or rather, I feel them. There's been such a negative dogpile on the film since its Cannes release, everyone joining the chorus of disappointment, that it's a pleasure to read someone else who connects with what the film - and what Wong - is about.
Sean: "My only concern is that the Wong detractors who think his films seem deep only to Occidental art house types (i.e. the accusation of condescension made by the condescending) will use the near-miss characterizations here to support their points. I'm pretty sure those detractors are wrong, but it does seem that the movie doesn't quite reach the emotional depths of its two precursors, "Chungking Express" and "In the Mood for Love."
This points up an issue that sort of loiters around the fringes of the "Blueberry Nights" discussion -- and the subject of Wong generally: To what extent do subtitles encourage non-Chinese viewers to give a movie the benefit of the doubt?
I've read complaints that the dialogue in "Blueberry Nights" is too simplistic or fortune cookie-aphoristic, and that the performances are not as deep as in other Wong films. But is this really the case? I adored "2046" but even so, there were times where the movie verged on (or tipped into) preciousness or incoherence, and times when one or more actors seemed as if they were fudging an emotion a bit because they either didn't know quite what was expected of them or the director wanted to keep his options open. In Chinese with subtitles, English-speaking viewers are (it seems to me) inclined to read this as complexity or mystery, or as evidence of some cultural aspect they couldn't understand unless they were from the filmmaker's country. But mightn't it be that "My Blueberry Nights" is not appreciable shallower than, say, about a third of Wong's output -- that "Nights" is, like all Wong's films, a movie in which the shots, the cuts, the music, the whole gestalt constitute about 90 percent of what's memorable about the film, and we the viewer supply a good deal of the coherence, the depth, by imprinting our own emotions onto it?
Put it another way: If some of the Wong films against which "Blueberry Nights" is being judged and found sorely lacking were transposed to the U.S. and made in English, preserving more or less the same situations and shots and cuts, would we read them as being as deep, complex and coherent as the Chinese originals?
I know this is an absurd hypothetical that is untestable and doesn't settle anything, but you see what I'm getting at, and I'm curious if anybody out there has wondered the same thing.
It's kind of the "Star Wars" argument in reverse -- that if Lucas' dialogue were delivered in Dutch or Japanese and read onscreen in subtitles, would at least some of the complaints about bad dialogue and wooden characterizations disappear?
Interesting points, Matt – all of which make me think that perhaps actors like Tony Leung (who’s certainly used to Wong’s methods by now!) are simply more comfortable with Wong’s directing style than their western counterparts. The patience involved when you don’t know where your character is headed and why would seem to require stronger talent than Law and Jones. (I like Jude Law but he’s just not in the same league as Tony Leung.)
Frank: Regarding the format, as it turns out, no, it wasn't shot on High Def video, but on 35mm film, with a digital intermediate. The sheer amount of grain (characteristic of cranking up the gain on a high-end High Def video camera) fooled me, and I normally have a good eye for this kind of stuff. I read a bunch of reviews of the movie after seeing it -- including Armond's, which asserted incorrectly that it was shot on High Def. Dunno why I took this as validation of my bad call -- Armond is an absolutist about the aesthetic superiority of film over video, but he has a long track record of misdentifying one as the other.
High Def is becoming so versatile, and amenable to so many film-like effects, that it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference, even if you have an eye for the tells. I don't believe that a single review of The Lookout (including mine) mentioned that it was shot on High Def video, but it was.
Matt:
Thanks for getting back to me on that. Recently in interviews, Wong said he's very much an old-school director and that the people at Digital Domain told him that when he was doing a DI on the film.
It's true that it's getting a bit tougher to tell (I doubt 95% of viewers will be able to tell that Wanted is shot on digital), but it's still apparent at this point. I know well of Armond's opinion on film over video, but it's a little disconcerting to know that he makes these errors from time to time. Maybe the gap is being bridged.
However, that being said, the grain in My Blueberry Nights was nowhere near as rich or vivid as the grain in Happy Together, if that makes any sense. Maybe that's the reason some might think that it was shot digitally.
Also, I don't know if Khondji has shot anything on digital yet. I don't think so.
Hi all. I haven't yet seen My Blueberry Nights---it hasn't come around to my part of New Jersey (I'm hoping it will; if not, I guess I'll have to make a special trip to NYC for it)---but I wanted to respond to something Matt said a couple of comments ago...specifically this:
But mightn't it be that "My Blueberry Nights" is not appreciable shallower than, say, about a third of Wong's output -- that "Nights" is, like all Wong's films, a movie in which the shots, the cuts, the music, the whole gestalt constitute about 90 percent of what's memorable about the film, and we the viewer supply a good deal of the coherence, the depth, by imprinting our own emotions onto it?
As some may or may not know, I wrote an appreciation of Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels on this very blog a long while ago, and later rehashed the film when I wrote a 5 for the Day piece about so-called "daydream movies." What neither of those pieces perhaps said explicitly was why I loved that particular Wong film personally: somehow, it speaks to that sense of loneliness I feel, say, when I'm all alone in my room on a Friday night fantasizing about what the nightlife might look and feel like in a big city. (That may give you all more information about myself than you may care to know...) It also perhaps appeals to my own notions of how big-city glamour masks an underlying disconnection and alienation. At least, that's what I see in it. Is that what Wong intended (and listening to the voiceover narration---which makes up probably about 90% of the spoken words in Fallen Angels---I have to believe he had something like that in mind), or am I just reading my own emotions and ideas into it somehow? I'm not sure---not sure if I entirely care either.
I usually don't watch Wong Kar-Wai films for profound insights into the beating romantic heart, though---as other have suggested, it's indeed the shots, the cuts, the slow-shutter-speed action sequences, the gazing of beautiful camera subjects, etc. Style over substance? I'd say that, in the case of Wong, style usually equals substance. All I know, though, is that sure does turn me on.
And as for the criticisms about the dialogue---well, I'm not sure if I've ever totally bought all of Wong's voiceover-narration ruminations on chance, romantic connection, and memories throughout his films. Sometimes they can seem more cutesy than profound (like the pineapple stuff in the first half of Chungking Express); they usually don't make me think of the world, or of human connection, in a revelatory, life-changing way. But damned if those pop-philosophical lines don't sound cool and evoke some kind of deep romantic stirring in ya.
If that's the kind of thing I should expect from My Blueberry Nights, then maybe I'll end up loving this film as well, minor as it may be in Wong's filmography. (I've been keeping my expectations low as a result of the generally middling reviews, but now count me as near-stoked again.)
Not sure if this adds constructively to the discussion, but I just felt compelled to chime in with my two cents---or cans of pineapple.
Frank: re film and video again: Part of what fooled me was my knowledge of the incremental, steady gains in quality and filmlikeness that High Def has made in the last three years; what was onscreen in "Nights" reminded me of underexposed/push processed Super 16mm (the film format that most reminds me of High Def). The last High Def movie to make great strides (David Fincher's "Zodiac") was so superior to what Michael Mann achieved with "Miami Vice" the year before that I think I might have subconsciously assumed "Nights" was the next step -- which is another way of saying there have been so many minor miracles in High Def recently that I'm expecting the final corner to be turned any day now.
Matt:
Zodiac did provide a glimpse of what is possible, especially considering when it's the same camera that Miami Vice was shot on and it looked vastly superior.
Despite that, I feel that we can't truly weigh up the impact of what digitally shot movies will look like until they're widely projected digitally.
As beautiful as Zodiac did look, I could easily see that it was shot on video (even though I knew the information before seeing it.) Then, I saw it projected digitally at the Ziegfield and it blew my mind. The thought that the film was shot digitally didn't pass me by, but it seemed so appropriate. Truly one of the few instances where the thought that digital is just another type of paint as opposed to film crept in. This was furthered by the screening I saw at Lincoln Center where it was projected digitally off the physical hard drives, which is what I would call THE flawless projection of Zodiac.
Either way, long ramblings about Zodiac aside, it may be hard to eclipse the idea of digital mimicking film (which is what most everyone is aspiring to do at this point, including the industry), but once it's projected digitally across the country, the line will slowly be erased and it'll come down to an aesthetical decision, rather than a technical or budgetary one. I mean, truthfully, does the common moviegoer know that Click was shot digitally? Doubt it. Do they care? Doubt it. Would a movie like Click benefitted from being shot digitally? Nope. But would The New World have suffered if it had been shot digitally? Very much so.
Anyway, sorry about the tangential comments about digital photography.
Thoughts on My Blueberry Nights (Spoilers!):
As a rather hardcore Wong fan, I found the effort to be largely soulless, especially compared to his previous efforts. Take for instance the sequence where he fetishizes a Jaguar. I've never seen Wong devote that much attention to a thing that wasn't human before.
The self-referential element of this effort really rubbed me the wrong way also. In 2046, the references were all self-contained within the trilogy of films (from Days of Being Wild to In the Mood for Love to 2046). Here, they actually made me laugh (in a bad way). Naming Rachel's character Sue Lynn (Maggie Cheung's character in Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love's name was Su Li-Zhen), to using a harmonica version of Yumeji's theme (maybe commenting on the Western nature of this film?).
In terms of style, I thought some of it was just lazy filmmaking. Very few of the step frame shots delivered quite an impact, whereas they always do in his previous films. I thought the cinematography in it was by far the worst in any of his films. His compositions in 2.35 were far weaker than his first foray into 2.35 aspect ratio in 2046. The editing in the first sequence was largely disjointed and very much non-rhythmic.
And in terms of characters, there was nothing much for me to hold onto. Maybe this is partly due to the fact that the voiceover (for the first time in a Wong film) wasn't directed to us, the audience, but instead to another character in the film (via postcards). A minor disconnect, but maybe also a partial reason.
I thought the one scene that actually worked really well was the scene with Chan Marshall. That was as close to his previous works than anything else. As for the ending, well, I thought it was fairly crap. I could have done without the actual kiss. It was statement enough that she showed up, he didn't need to hammer the point home (and the first time that I didn't think a Wong film left me in raptures during the final sequence).
I had been dreading it ever since I first heard the cast. I had such low expectations walking into the theatre, but by the time I was in my seat, I was quietly getting very excited. Unfortunately, I didn't think much of it, there's nothing much to hold onto. But it's just one effort, I'm sure he'll have more to offer the next time around.
I'm enjoying the discussion about digital capturing. There exists a relatively new addition to the filmmaker's arsenal which, I believe, will change the game completely, and If this doesn't hasten the death of film, it certainly places it on life support. Have you folks heard of the Red One Camera?
Developed by Jim Jannard, CEO of Oakley, the sports optics company, it's not a set up from your HVX1000 or EX1, or any of the other prosumer camcorders. This is not for run and gun shooting or documentary or anything less than a well planned, coordinated, old fashioned style film shoot. The camera is hefty, it requires a lot of support equipment, like a good tripod, rails, lenses, monitor ( they are just starting to equip them with view finders, which has been the one and only knock against it), etc. The closest thing I would compare it to is an ARRI 35 camera.
Now get this: It has a 12 megapixel, 24.4mm x 13.7mm (Super35mm) chip. Consider that for a moment. It records 4k, 3k, and 2k RGB formats with a low end of 1fps on all formats and a high end of 120 fps on the 3 and 2k formats.
However, that alone isn't what makes this camera astonishing, and it has many aspects which astonish. What really puts this over is that it records in RAW format which makes for an odd workflow, but a malleable image. Anyone who has used a still camera which uses this format knows what the RED does. For others, basically it records metadata with each image that it imports with the file. So, while you may be changing the look of the image on your viewing monitor while you're shooting, you are not really changing anything permanently. When you put the footage on your computer you can drastically alter the exposure, sharpness, color, white balance, etc. of your footage. For editing, you import all your footage, make selects, export those as a low-res quicktime movies, use those QT movies to edit in your editing platform, then output your cut and sync it up with the original footage and you can now basically color correct and tweak everything you originally shot.
This work flow is amazing and it's a lot like the first non-linear editing systems that used low-res digital transfers from film negatives.
This is one serious camera and not the sort of run and gun thing we have grown used to with digital cinema. In a way this may feel like a step back for many folks. However, this might be the sort of restraint some digital video makers need, to free themselves from over shot, hand-held, unplanned cinema that holds no regard for composition, framing, and lighting. Yes, it costs a lot more than low-end HDV cameras (17K, for the body alone), making it more of a tool for commercial filmmakers, but compared to other, lesser cameras of its kind the RED is relatively cheap.
You can actually download the editing software
for free, and there's post footage on line.
I understand that the Coen's and Emmanuel Lubezki took a good hard look at this camera during pre-production of "Burn After Reading", but I can't claim for sure that they made it their choice.
www.red.com
I was referred to your review after posting my review elsewhere. It's a relief to find someone who feels the same as I do about both the film and its critical reception in the US.
Here's what I wrote:
"I'm perplexed by the mixed reviews for Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights. That's not to say it's a perfect or even great film. However, Wong has sustained over a decade of rave reviews before the mediocre consensus on his English language debut. My Blueberry Nights is cut from the exact same mold as all of the films he has made in Hong Kong since Days of Being Wild. Wong continues to do what he does well, and we see the same old flaws that have followed him around for years too.
Maybe there is something to be said for the claim that American viewers get caught up in the 'exoticism' of foreign cinema. How else can you explain the critical majority finally calling out Wong on the weaknesses that they've been giving him passes on for nearly 20 years now? Wong has never been a "weighty" filmmaker. He's never been terribly subtle either. We finally see his work with English dialogue, an American setting, and white actors, and all of a sudden, there's a problem.
Wong has built a career and a rather large following on fairly simplistic romantic-dramas that consistently cover the same thematic territory. However, he's always been worth looking at because of how much he conveys through the medium itself. My Blueberry Nights is no exception. Like everything else he's done, his English-language film has its share of unnecessary exposition, but the engrossing aesthetic is still there. There is thought and consideration within every single shot of this film. While the story is a bit of a retread for Wong, his vision still feels fresh, and the story is still an engaging one. I would challenge anyone to find an American romantic drama that looks or even feels quite like this one. Wong's films have always worked better as audio/visual experiences and engaging love stories than intellectual exercises, and this might be the film that proves that point to those that have followed him. He's done imperfect work for his entire career, but what he can present on screen has always been unlike what anyone else could. This is what makes Wong Kar-Wai an interesting filmmaker and why My Blueberry Nights really isn't a step down from what he's always been doing."
to using a harmonica version of Yumeji's theme
Well, is there a better metaphor for this film's very existence than that musical selection? "WKW on a Harmonica" is basically the high concept pitch, isn't it?
As a WKW devotee, I found this film strong, though it probably doesn't rank very high amongst his works. It was fascinating, though, to see his usual themes and techniques "harmonica-ized". In the film's earliest moments, I was actually put off a bit by slow motion and skip-frames, but then I realized that this is a film about people stuck where they are, immobile in a land where travel is the norm.
WKW has always had a strong sense of place (not to mention time, both of which reach their apotheosis in 2046, where 2046 is a place and a time), but he has also had a strong sense of displacement, and travel as a possible antidote. The theme of travel exemplifies itself most clearly in Chungking Express (My Blueberry Nights could easily be the movie that happens when Faye Wong goes off to be a stewardess before the final scene) and, of course, Happy Together, which is (amongst other things) about a man coming to the place where he has to find his way home. The WKW pyrotechnics in Nights serve, for me, the purpose of illustrating the entrapment felt by characters stuck in the wrong place with no way out -- Rachel Weisz's character is one of the few that verbalizes this, but nearly all the characters spend at least some time trapped where they ought not be.
The sound design underscores the theme beautifully, as well. We constantly hear the sounds of travel: trains, traffic, and (in the moment when Norah Jones enters the Fremont Medical Clinic) airplanes. The world is constantly on the move, even when our characters cannot be. And their attempts are often foiled -- recall that Jones is mugged on the subway, remember the two trains literally passing in the night as Jude Law and his ex bid each other farewell (on the night before she has to catch a flight!), remember the vehicle of David Straitharn's cop's fate.
These are concepts; I don't know that the movie is as experiential as WKW's other work (2046 not only combines time and place, it also synthesizes concept and experience to a majestic degree). But there was certainly enough going on that I was compelled throughout the film, and have continued to think about it since leaving the theater.
David: "Wong's films have always worked better as audio/visual experiences and engaging love stories than intellectual exercises, and this might be the film that proves that point to those that have followed him. He's done imperfect work for his entire career, but what he can present on screen has always been unlike what anyone else could."
Absolutely.
Just to reiterate: I'm not trying to claim that this movie is on part with his greatest work; in fact, I'd agree that it's pretty much an exercise with a smiley face on it.
But what I am saying -- and I get the impression some others might agree -- is that filmmakers like Wong are essentially visual musicians. We don't expect musicians to ponder weighty themes or to remake a genre from the ground up each time they get in front of a microphone. It's nice when they do. But sometimes they just want to play, and when the musician is amazing, I'm happy to listen. As long as there's passion, craft and a sense of fun, I usually go home happy.
If I thought Wong were phoning it in, I'd feel differently. But I think he put his heart and soul into this one. It's a delicate construction, but beautiful. And I don't think the flaws most critics have fixated on are appearing here for the first time, either. They were always aspects of Wong's filmography and they're foregrounded now because the actors are mostly Caucasian, the language is English and we're likely to have had firsthand experience with the settings and cultures he depicts. He's getting at many of the same feelings and issues that he deals with in all of his movies, but it's more spare and intimate and ephemeral here. To switch comparison points from music to fine art, this isn't the Sistine Chapel ceiling of "2046," it's a series of charcoal figure sketches. But it's still Michelangelo. What matters is the interaction of charcoal and paper, the interplay of line and white space, not so much the subject or the degree of difficulty.
I also disagree that the movie is compositionally weak. On the contrary, there are some profile two-shots, tight profile closeups, multi-plane master shots and counterintutive head-on close-ups (ones where the subject is pushed screen right, looking right, or pushed screen left, looking left, with the rest of the frame devoid of human presence) that are some of the most strikingly extreme such compositions I've ever seen him attempt.
Criterion Collection would be dumb to commission a new essay for their inevitable Blueberry disc when there's this here comprehensive, bracing beauty. Matt, I agree with all of your juicy observations as applied to WKW's design and conceptual framework. WKW is the filmmaker who makes apartments weep and doorknobs gasp.
In the wake of deep disappointment with his American debut, many critics-- myself included-- turned in reviews almost as listless as we felt Blueberry to be. You're right that Blueberry is authentic WKW-- again, in concept and design.
In performance, it is mostly wack. Wax figuration. Missing is the spark that makes WKW's greatest flicks groove: street/office/apartment reality. Wong's best urban fictions pull a lot more from their scrappy locations and the stray, odd humanity passing through them. A WKW without that sense of improvisatory tumult is like Star Wars without The Force (ie the pixel-puke prequels). Prevized, presold, overbudgeted, overdeveloped Ho'wood is no place for a filmmaker like Wong. Not that American-style development hell had anything to do with this foreign-produced, Weinstein-distributed film's making, but the general stiltedness and strained, false, TV-solicitious performances (Law, Strathairn and Portman notwithstanding) reek of indiewood rot. Or at least an uncharacteristic timidity in the filmmaker, bold as his blues and reds be.
I want a do-over. I want Wong to jump on the 6 train uptown and recast this romance with the stylish, crazy Dominican kids in the South Bronx. Or real crazy kids anywhere, of any age. Real, real, real. Don't give me no movie stars unless they pull off what Wong's HK stars managed to do, disappear into their soulful, eccentric workaday characters.
Yes, WKW's beloved movies are sculpted out of dream life and inner life, but they are never, at the core, fantasies. They are as real as you and me. Like many great filmmakers who graduate to potential irrelevance, he needs to get his ass back in the streets and find the real.
The director's maturity was majestic in ITMFL and 2046, but it would be so cool if he had given up some of that rigor in his exploration of foreign turf, got a little lost and let loose in the manner of Chungking/Fallen Angels. Take the camera off the tripod and dive into the crowd. Maybe Gus Van Sant could show him the way to this fountain of youth.
Great discussion. I'm really enjoying reading everyone's thoughtful comments.
I'd like to make two points:
1) One thing not being considered here is the affect on Norah Jones fans. When I went to opening night screening, there were a decent amount of teenage/young women in the screening. This was their first introduction to a Wong Kar Wai film! They seemed a little perplexed, but seemed to enjoy it. That said, I think this film made a good introduction to Wong's work and the video will do much better. The film was intrinsically more interesting than most standard Hollywood fare so it was disappointing that critic after critic jumped on the "let's bash Wong Kar Wai" band-wagon.
2) Some people were complaining about the editing/pacing/flow. The film has been edited significantly from Cannes as I have read. Hopefully the full version will be released on video so we can see how the original flowed. That said, I don't expect the film to be better or much better but an interesting recognition from the filmmaker that the film really wasn't working.
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