Two of the slots in Francis’s “20 essential films to be marooned in a deserted island with” belong to films directed by the brilliant Wong Kar-Wai: the quirky, delicious, delirious, and ultimately heartbreaking Chungking Express (1994), about two sets of lovers in a Hong Kong anxiously awaiting the handover back to China, and the gorgeously-shot and designed but bone-achingly sad tale of two unhappily married people falling in love with each other, In the Mood for Love (2000), which Sofia Coppola has acknowledged as one of the main inspirations for her own masterpiece of dislocated feelings, Lost in Translation. I am such an ardent Wong fan that I have seen almost all of his movies and some of them twice. Two years ago, I took a Facets Film School class about his work, and nearly brawled with two annoyingly pretentious, pseudo film-geeks who seemed like they based their knowledge of Asian culture on being avid customers of Panda Express (sniff!). I really think Wong is unsurpassed right now among contemporary directors in successfully evoking mood, emotions, and characters’ perspectives with the barest of dialogue- instead he uses cinematography, actors’ facial expressions, design, and innovative editing techniques (both fast-frame and slow motion). Wong has a unique, identifiable style, and a very specific East Asian point of view - a world view that contains fatalism; deep-seated melancholy; loyalty (to family, to loved ones); a focus on subtext and unexpressed emotions; the powerful influence of the past on the present and the de-emphasis, almost the avoidance, of thinking about the future and what comes next. So I was very, very nervous to go see his first English-language film, My Blueberry Nights, set and shot in America, starring Hollywood stars…and Norah Jones. Will his style and sensibility translate well? Will he be able to still create a distinctive Wong Kar-Wai film versus an attempt to come up with a Hollywood art film? Can he give an interesting take on distinctively American situations, characters, and milieus? What can he do with Norah Jones’s, uhmmm, acting prowess? Well, I’m sure Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, Warren Buffett, masters all of their fields, have had bad days sometimes, and that’s fine. I’d like to think that the Wong who directed My Blueberry Nights was just having one long bad day.
Don’t get me wrong, the movie isn’t horrible, by any means. As to be expected from any Wong movie, it is a visual stunner, stylishly shot by the masterful Darius Khondji in burnt-orange hues and reddish glows, smoky hazes, moody grays and dim lights, and soul-baring close-ups. The musical score by Ry Cooder, and the many songs - by Cooder, Norah Jones, Cat Marshall, Otis Redding, and Academy Award winner Gustavo Santaollala, among others - that comprise the soundtrack, are haunting and strongly evocative of heartbreak and solitude, cerebral rainy-day mood songs. There is a vigorous, memorable, wonderfully-fleshed out performance by Natalie Portman as a gambler with father issues that Norah Jones’s Elizabeth meets in Las Vegas. But despite all of these, My Blueberry Nights feels hollow and uninvolving. It meanders along, without any visible hook for its audience to cling to. If, in telling the story of a heartbroken New Yorker who bounces to Memphis than Las Vegas than back to New York in order to piece herself together again, Wong is trying to make sense of the emotional disconnectedness and alienation that we sometimes go through, then I definitely don’t think he succeeds. In his most resonant films, Wong portrays emotional dislocation as either a direct result of, or immensely impacted by, social and cultural dislocation. The Hong Kong citizens in Chungking Express do crazy things and cling to memories of former loves partly because these are coping mechanisms for the current of anxiety that is running through their city, their society, with regards to the British handing Hong Kong back to China. The married leads of In the Mood for Love are suffocated by the strict, conservative Asian social mores they have to still live with despite a modernizing Hong Kong in the 1960s. The tumultuous relationship of the gay lovers in Happy Together is made even more difficult by the fact that they are Chinese expatriates in macho, inward-looking Buenos Aires. But I don’t think Wong has the same handle on the social and cultural roots of emotional disaffection and isolation in 21st century United States, he just isn’t familiar enough with the cultural landscape and all its nuances. It’s like asking Martin Scorcese to do a wuxia film- it’s ambitious and tantalizing, but it’s a big gamble that is set up to fail.
And then there’s Norah Jones. Norah Jones is a very good singer. Norah Jones can sing dramatically, emphatically, mesmerizingly. However, Norah Jones cannot act. Which is a really big problem in a movie which requires, ah, acting. I can’t begin to fathom what Wong saw in her which made him offer her the role (yes, Norah Jones didn’t audition for this movie- huge gay gasp!), especially since in his past movies, he has showcased the greatest actresses of Asian cinema- Ziyi Zhang, Maggie Cheung, Gong Li, Faye Wong, Brigette Lin- and made them shine. With the amount of acting that Norah demonstrated in My Blueberry Nights, which sad to say, is very little, my dry cleaner, the trainers at my gym, any of my female BFFs, hell, even I, could have played the part of Elizabeth better than her. I mean, would it have killed her to try and convey some emotion, some interesting reaction, some sense of character believability, instead of sitting or standing there looking like someone just tasered her?
My Blueberry Nights is in limited release in Chicago and everywhere else in the US.
Tags: My Blueberry Nights, Wong Kar-Wai
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