In a colorful and vibrantly shot New York café, owner Jeremy (Jude Law) bakes a blueberry pie every day, even though nobody ever buys it. "What's wrong with it?" asks the recently broken-hearted Elizabeth (Norah Jones). "There's nothing wrong with the blueberry pie. Just people make other choices. You can't blame the blueberry pie."
My Blueberry Nights proves that Wong Kar-wai is still a romantic, and unapologetically so. Here he creates a love story that doesn't involve the budding attraction or the development of a relationship. It's just the base instinct to fall in love. It's simple, and so what? The blueberry pie metaphor is obvious, but potent. After a bad break-up, Elizabeth leaves New York and travels westbound, stopping to live in several cities. Before her departure, she frequents nightly a café owned by the flippantly charming Jeremy. Not realizing then that they're meant to be together, their love for each other only blossom as the physical distance between them grow.
When the film debuted at the Cannes film festival last year, the reaction My Blueberry Nights received was lukewarm—some even called it Wong's worst film—an anomaly in this Chinese auteur's brilliant career. Maybe there were some expectations in the fact that this is his first movie with an English-speaking cast. Maybe it doesn't utilize the American cities to their potential. Like most of Wong's other works, the sets in My Blueberry Nights are bars, restaurants, cafes, apartments and hotel rooms; filled with moody music and cigarette smoke. It's a repetition of what he's done before, and it can be argued that it doesn't portray America as well as, say, how Chungking Express and Fallen Angels showed the intriguing sides of Hong Kong's community.
The thing is, it doesn't need to be, precisely because it\'s not about the places visited but the space between those places. It's important to remember that this film is about the distance that love can transcend. By having Elizabeth travel across America, Wong Kar-wai can show that distance on screen—aided by title cards keeping track of how many miles Elizabeth and Jeremy are apart—while still keeping them in the same country, bound by the open roads and highways that span across the American landscape. This is something he could not have done without the US setting. To set it in his usual Hong Kong would not permit the thousands of miles of travel, and to have the film hop about like in 2046 wouldn't maintain that feeling of them being so close yet so far apart.
To call this a road movie would be inaccurate, because it's not about the journey… It's about the search to stop. Reunion is the main theme of the film. Aside from Elizabeth and Jeremy, in Memphis we also meet an alcoholic cop (David Strathaim) and his estranged sultry wife (Rachel Weisz), both not realizing their love until the other one's gone. The same theme is repeated with a chronic gambler character (Natalie Portman) who's reluctant to meet her dying father. The characters in Wong Kar-wai's films are motivated by feelings, not goals, and defined by their quirks (usually having something to do with the concept of time). Here we have the cop whose every night is his last night drinking, the café owner who obsessively uses a CCTV camera as a diary, and a gambler with no other purpose than to travel from one casino to another.
Interesting to note, however, that the main character is a cipher with no defining feature of her own. We know absolutely nothing about her, and Norah Jones doesn't act so much as she observes, aiding the much more interesting supporting characters. She even changes her name every time she's in a new location, making it difficult for Jeremy to track her down. It's unusual, and she's certainly Wong's blandest character to date, but it fits, cleverly, with the movie's primary metaphor. She's the blueberry pie, the one often ignored. Does she not deserve love her way anyway?
Like a Wong Kar-wai film should be, My Blueberry Nights is about the evoking of emotions rather than the exploration of them. Meaning, its strength is in highlighting human emotions with gorgeous images, enveloping music and soulful acting—rather than storytelling.
The movie is not a story about something, but rather a melancholic scrapbook of lingering thoughts and clandestine wishes, artfully designed to near perfection.
"My Blueberry Nights" opens February 13, 2008 and is rated PG13. Drama. Directed by Wong Kar Wai. Written by Wong Kar Wai, Lawrence Block. Starring Jude Law, Norah Jones, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz, David Straitham.
