The famous story about Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai is that, in 1993 or so, he got so bogged down in the editing of his martial-arts epic, Ashes of Time, that he went on a wild adventure to free up his cinematic mind. He and cinematographer Christopher Doyle hired a few actors, including a pop starlet who’d never acted before, and went off into the streets of Hong Kong to improvise what became Chungking Express.
That film is a gorgeous oddity. It has two stories that barely link in narrative terms, though thematically they are a good fit. Then again, Wong’s thematic concerns, at least since Chungking Express, mostly seem to devolve upon forms of love missed or lost, love at oblique angles. In the Mood for Love is perhaps his most extraordinary disquisition on this theme, though his earlier Happy Together is nearly as amazing.
It is a gay love story — or non-love-story — headlining the two biggest male stars of Hong Kong cinema, Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung (though it’s set in Buenos Aires). The Western equivalent would be Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise taking the lead roles in a tormented and very “arty” gay drama, including uncompromising sex. Obviously that would never happen, but it gives you an idea of Wong’s filmmaking: such a film would make Brokeback Mountain look like an episode of I Love Lucy.
With his latest, My Blueberry Nights, Wong extends his characteristic style into new territories. It’s in English and made in the United States. It’s an oblique love story, but not as imbued with a tragic sense of love lost as either In the Mood for Love or Happy Together. (I’m leaving out Wong’s 2046, a half-futuristic movie that didn’t work at all for me. Its German title is Die Ultimative Liebesfilm, which it most certainly is not.)
In My Blueberry Nights Jude Law plays Jeremy, the bartender/manager of a small New York bar-cum-eaterie. Norah Jones is Elizabeth, who’s just been dumped by her boyfriend and, of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she has to walk into his. Jeremy, who has an easy charm and a sympathetic ear, gives Elizabeth a listen and some blueberry pie. They connect. But she runs off on an odyssey across the United States, either to find herself or lose herself. On the way she has various encounters with characters such as a drunk who’s also lost his love (David Strathairn) and a travelling gambler (Natalie Portman) who takes Elizabeth off on another cross-country journey.
This is a lovely structure for an episodic story; it’s about the kinds of encounters one has over bars or across the green baize of a poker table. Elizabeth meets Jeremy across his bar, then becomes someone who meets others from behind a bar. If the film rather fails to come to life for some stretches, it’s either because the episodic narrative makes the storytelling uneven, or because Jones is not a terribly good actor. Or both.
Perhaps to avoid overshadowing her, Law underplays. If he means to suggest emotions burning beneath the surface, it’s not evident. Hence the interaction between Jeremy and Elizabeth, which is supposed to drive and frame the overall story, is less than compelling. The fact that they are both cute is not enough.
And there is another consideration. A possibly apocryphal but characteristic story is told of Alfred Hitchcock: when actors asked him how they were supposed to be feeling in a shot, what emotions they should project, he’d say: “Just keep your face blank and I’ll cut it so the audience knows what you’re feeling.” And he did.
This is a lesson in cinematic storytelling in which the camera and the editing do as much or more work than the actors. In film, after all, the camera is the equivalent of the writer’s pen — the tool that makes it all happen. In conventional movies the camera is little more than a recording instrument that registers the actors’ projected emotions — or the familiar expressions that pass for emotion. It’s a kind of filmed theatre. But Wong, at his best, makes of the camera more than a recording device: the cinematography itself generates mood and emotion. In In the Mood for Love and Happy Together Doyle’s camerawork is so beautiful, so intuitively linked to the semi-improvised narratives, that he must be credited as co-auteur on those movies.
Is the new film’s relative lack of effect to do with not having Doyle to “lens” the thing (as Variety verbs that noun)? Replacement cinematographer Darius Khondji artifies everything — there seems to be neon in at least one corner of every frame (neon equals America, of course, long before we get to any casino) and he never misses an opportunity to shoot through a window with writing on it. The film, all saturated colours and moody night-time feel (even in the daytime), looks good — but, compared with Doyle’s work for Wong, it’s static and stagey.
Maybe it’s the result of shooting in the US or in English. Or maybe it’s that, unlike Wong’s past few movies, My Blueberry Nights appears to have an actual script (by Wong and crime writer Lawrence Block). It feels as though Block, probably an inappropriate choice, was specially charged with creating a Wong Kar Wei movie in English. The elements are there, but My Blueberry Nights feels like a weakish imitation of a Wong film. At best it’s entry-level Wong.