My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar Wai, 2008)

The promising first English-language film from director Wong Kar Wai, My Blueberry Nights recalls similarities to his Hong Kong debut As Tears Go By. Both films run a little choppier than the best Kar Wai films, with a couple of scenes that seem to stick out as rough or set-up (the nosebleed scene specifically) but singling them out feels like nitpicking a film that offers so many beautiful and meditative moments and feels like the director is once again on the verge of delivering a masterpiece (Tears itself was a less-developed precursor to his first classics Days of Being Wild and Chungking Express).

And My Blueberry Nights is a more fully formed feature than Tears ever was. At times poignant and melancholic – emotions that seem to breathe through every scene of film in a Wong Kar Wai movie – My Blueberry Nights offers some of the breathless moments of life’s retrospection that we’ve come to expect from his features… moments spent reflecting on the lives these characters have led and informing us of the future they have before them. There’s a scene early on as Jude Law and Norah Jones’ characters discuss a bowlful of keys and the lives attached to them, that wouldn’t work if not for Kar Wai’s gentle touch. The “You can’t blame the Blueberry pie” line alone works wonders for informing us about whom these people are (and immediately makes up for vagueness the title has before you reach it). People are always what a Wong Kar Wai film is foremost about (in Fallen Angels he might have been the first filmmaker to ever create a hitman relationship movie) and this story is no different.

Here we meet Norah Jones’ jilted lover and come to know her first only through her moments with Law’s diner owner/clerk. And sometimes the story is best told in these glimpses, short bursts of scenes that are spliced up, sped up or slowed down giving the viewer more an idea of who they are then a full picture.

Then Kar Wai does what he does best, he lets Jones character retreat into the background while her story plays on via Law. Our prime participator in the story becomes an observer of another one, as Jones hops a bus and witnesses a disintegrating marriage between David Straithairn’s nightly drunken cop and the woman that got away (Rachel Weisz) down in Memphis. Then once that wraps and Jones moves on, we’re treated to another one where Jones plays only a slightly more engaged presence to Natalie Portman’s surprisingly genuine and wonderful performance as Leslie, a poker pro that naturally sends them both off to Las Vegas.

These are the straying storylines of Wong Kar Wai’s American road trip. And it all leads us back home again, where as the film closes we realize that’s where we wanted to be in the first place. There isn’t a lot of time dedicated to the budding relationship between Law and Jones, but it’s one you can’t wait to see revisited. It’s a beautiful movie, bursting with the vivid colors, largely neon, of Christopher Doyle’s cinematography… and it’s a cinematic treat.

Try the Blueberry pie.