Further Thoughts on My Blueberry Nights

In my review, I said that this film doesn’t quite work for me, and I also said I don’t know why.  Even though, on paper, it has what appears to be all the usual hallmarks of Wong Kar-wai’s work and ought to add up to his usual sensuous beauty, it doesn’t.  I still don’t know what it is that causes the film to feel off (as I’ve said, I think it must be more than just the fact that it’s in English,) but I want to try and articulate how that offness manifests itself within the film.

The best way I can describe it?  It feels like Wong Kar-wai Does Hollywood, or possibly Hollywood Does Wong Kar-wai.  Typically for me, Wong’s movies feel so real.  The casual dialogue and seeming aimlessness has such an unstudied quality to it, and the colors, camera angles, and music fill me so much that I feel immersed in the characters’ world, like I’m almost swimming through it.  The gentle connections, the pregnant pauses, the opportunities that slip just out of reach – it’s all so real.

And even when it’s not – the poetic voiceovers, the obsessive but beautiful rituals – it still feels real.  Not the way life is, but like a dream is.  These are films that get me hook, line, and sinker.  The passion overwhelms and the heartache sears.  You can practically feel the summer swelter and smell the cigarette smoke.  Works of life and dream with art wrapped around it.  Whenever I rewatch them, I’m often so still, because there’s a sort of spell in them; I don’t want to break it.

That, for me, is what My Blueberry Nights is missing.  Even though it has the same elements, it doesn’t feel right.  Even though the cast includes plenty of excellent actors, I notice them all acting here, see the strings.  Even though Wong follows his conceit of repeating the same few significant songs multiple times, I barely notice them.  Even though, on the face of it, knowing the stories of all the breakups behind the jar of discarded keys in your café is no stranger than deciding you’re moving on from your ex on a certain date and collecting cans of pineapple with that expiration date, it doesn’t feel genuine with Jeremy the way it does with Cop 223.  Everything feels a little removed, a little artificial.

It’s true that Wong’s filmmaking process is very fluid and unique, and it takes a certain type of actor to be able to work that way.  Is it just that these American and English actors can’t adjust to the improvised way he builds his stories from the ground up?  Possible, but I’m not sure.  After all, there are actors who’ve only been in a single Wong film, like Leon Lai and Michelle Reis in Fallen Angels, who’ve done just fine, and while Ziyi Zhang was a latecomer to Wong, she’s stellar in both 2046 and The Grandmaster.  If the Chinese actors can learn to work that way, why not the Brits and Americans? 

In all honesty, the film is fine.  If it weren’t a Wong movie, I might not have been so bothered by the way it holds you at arms length.  But it is, and I know all the stunning beauty and romance he’s capable of, and so I’m sad for what it might have been.

My Blueberry Nights (2007, PG-13)

In Wong Kar-wai’s body of work, this film is definitely the odd one out.  It’s set in America with all the dialogue in English and a cast of mostly U.S. and U.K. English-speaking actors.  It’s… I don’t know.  It isn’t a bad film, but it’s far and away my least favorite of Wong’s movies.  Even though, on paper, it seems to have a lot of the right elements and features a number of actors that, while newcomers to Wong, I’ve liked/loved in other things, it just doesn’t click for me.

When Elizabeth breaks up with her boyfriend, she leaves her keys to his place at a café for him to pick up.  Every night find her drifting back to the café, though, and every night finds the keys unclaimed.  She begins a tentative friendship with the compassionate owner, bonding with him over heartbreak and pie, but her mind keeps turning to the past.  In an effort to truly move on, she leaves town, slowly working her away across the country and meeting other lost souls like her, from a melancholy alcoholic who can’t let go of his ex-wife to a shrewd gambler avoiding her fractured relationship with her father.

Like I said, theoretically, pretty much everything you need is there.  Lovelorn people who nurture obsessive quirks to push through their loneliness?  Check.  Stunning color saturation and moody film aesthetics, like introspective slow motion?  Check.  Sad, gentle voiceovers?  Check.  Shy connections being made and unmade?  Check.  Really, there are only three of Wong’s big staples missing, and two of them – his regular actors and the Cantonese language – are intentionally left out by virtue of making it an American story, neither of which constitutes an inherent mistake.  The third missing element, for me, is the music.  While the movie makes good use of a few fine songs, they don’t soak into the skin of the film the way Wong’s song choices normally do.  It’s the only aspect that stands out to me as solidly lacking; everything else ought to work.

But that’s the thing.  It doesn’t, not quite, and I don’t know why.  I don’t think it’s the change-up in language/setting – while it’s unusual to see a bunch of white English-speakers in a Wong story, I don’t think speaking English in and of itself makes the movie less successful.  But something’s off.  Nothing quite comes together the way it should, and the film feels a little too slow and a little too removed as a result.

Plenty of actors I like here.  Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, David Strathairn, and Natalie Portman all appear, but even though I enjoy all of them elsewhere, none of them quite seem to fit here.  If anything, the greenest actor of the bunch – Norah Jones, playing Elizabeth in her first acting role – feels the most Wong.  Even though she doesn’t have the same skill and experience as an actor, there’s a quiet authenticity to her portrayal that the others never quite manage. 

Warnings

Brief violence and drinking/smoking.