My Blueberry Nights
Review by Brandon Fibbs | posted 4/04/2008
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Wong Kar Wai is one of today's most original and visually unique directors. His highly stylized, non-linear storytelling is more like experiencing a dream than watching a film. He seeks to communicate sensory impressions over quantifiable details. His plots pale in comparison to his stream-of-consciousness poetry. And how exactly does one describe the plot of a poem? It is a thing disjoined, impressionistic, ephemeral and open to interpretation.
Internationally acclaimed in his native Hong Kong, Wong is hoping his visual and philosophical technique translates for Western audiences in his debut English language feature, My Blueberry Nights. Like his ravishingly beautiful In the Mood for Love and 2046, the director's latest film is less about narrative and more about the sort of sultry visual moodiness that lingers with us long after the facts of the story have faded.
Norah Jones as Elizabeth
When we first meet Elizabeth (songstress Norah Jones in her screen debut), she is a woman suffering from emotional shell shock. Night after night, she wanders into Jeremy's (Jude Law) Manhattan diner in a trance-like daze, searching for an absent boyfriend. Full of empathy and omniscient advice, Jeremy looks forward to Elizabeth's visits. But she vanishes from his life and his diner the night she finally finds her lover canoodling back at his apartment with another woman. Heartbroken, she flees the city.
Not knowing whether she is running from or toward something, Elizabeth ends up in Memphis, Tennessee. There she befriends the troubled, alcoholic, cuckolded cop Arnie (David Strathairn) and his estranged wife, Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz; note how her character's name looks American but sounds Chinese). Sharing days at the diner and nights at the bar, Lizzie, as she now calls herself, immediately understands Arnie's pain but is, perhaps, most surprised that she can also identify with Sue Lynne's problematic motivations.
Jude Law as Jeremy
When she next hits the road, Lizzie now goes by Beth, a cocktail waitress in a Nevada casino who falls in with Leslie (Natalie Portman), a down-on-her-luck gambler with a very personal score to settle. Leslie either holds the key to Beth's future or will leave her stranded in a vast, sweltering desert that exists both geographically and allegorically.
Everyone Elizabeth/Lizzie/Beth meets is facing excruciating circumstances, most greater even then her own. As she witnesses the agony of their loneliness and the emptiness of their relationships, she begins to comprehend that her physical travelogue is but a metaphor for a greater journey of exploration going on within herself, a journey from heartbreak to self-discovery. Will she keep running, from one place to the next, never staying long enough to be vulnerable, or will she double back on her own tracks and confront her greatest anguish and perhaps even stumble onto her greatest joy?
My Blueberry Nights is trademark Wong Kar Wai. Slow and deliberate, the film is saturated with vibrant, neon colors, bleached personalities and dreamy digital esthetics. Trains, a key motif in almost all of Wong's films, are shown often, constantly in motion from one place to the next, never sitting still. Though the action is set amidst vast metropolises, we see the cities in miniature only, from the perspectives of corner diners and smoke-filled bars. Only the inhospitable Nevada desert is seen for what it really is, vast and desolate.
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