My Blueberry Nights

“My Blueberry Nights” is internationally acclaimed Korean filmmaker, Wong Kar Wai, first film in English and shot entirely in the States. The film is ravishing to look at and it has its moments of drama, but in the end the script was very mediocre, too full of clichés and conventional lines, and it can’t overcome the leaden performance of Norah Jones as Lizzie, and she is the hinge figure in the story. Wai had to persuade the singer to try acting and the results show her inexperience. Her lack of ability to loosen up and show some emotional nuance detracts from the other more worthy performances, so the story plods on with a large gap between Jones and the others. The talk throughout the film is rather trite and uninspiring. It is about love lost, love destroyed, and love found where you least expected it to be. When the pain of loss is overwhelming suicidal thoughts enter the picture.

Lizzie happens to go into a small café and bakery in New York City. (We are told it is New York but we never once see a tall building.) Behind the counter is Jeremy (Jude Law), a Brit now living in America. He can tell she is in the throes of a disintegrating relationship, and she is torn up about it. He befriends her and she starts coming in on a regular basis. He feeds her blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream to cheer her up. They hang out together, talk, and some affection develops between them, meaning more to Jeremy than Lizzie. Then she decides she needs to hit the road for year, so off she goes, keeping in touch with Jeremy by phone and post cards. She works as a waitress in a bar and witnesses a ruined marriage between an alcoholic cop (David Stratharin) and his sexy estranged wife (Rachel Weisz). The tension between them explodes one night and things end badly. She’s also working in a restaurant, running herself ragged trying to save money for a car. Men seemed to have no place in her life. Finally she moves to Nevada and gets hook up with Leslie (Natalie Portman), a young, glitzy poker player who seems to be a pathological liar and a person who advises, don’t trust anybody, including her. She stakes Leslie to a poker game with her car money, but she loses it, so she travels to Las Vegas with Leslie because she has no choice. When they get there it is too late, Leslie’s father has died before she could see him. She had pretended she didn’t care, but she did. And it turns out she had lied about the poker game; she actually cleaned out the people she was playing with but wanted Lizzie’s company as they drove on to Las Vegas. Eventually, she gives Lizzie the cash for a car. She had learned more about alienation and loneliness from Leslie

So she heads back to the Diner, to Blueberry pie a la mode, and to Jeremy who she now understands is more important to her than she thought when she took off from New York. Their reunion completes the circle of going forth and coming back to a love she didn’t recognize until after she hit the road. Jeremy feels the same way: Once she was gone he wanted her. The film ends with a luscious kiss between the two in the Diner, a kiss shot from above, a bird’s eye view, which was unusual and very effective.

The America presented in this film is a neon-tinged artificial world, like a planet set apart but which is a stage for love lost and love gained, where lovers dance and kiss and whirl away to dance again with more awareness. From the beginning of the film my eyes feasted on the dynamic splashes of color used in the film; it was an extravaganza of pinks, and blues and scarlet, with emerald green and cadmium yellow, sliding about among some moving planes of dark umber and ivory black. Simple things took on a new magnificence with well-placed color accents. Other hues were electric; some burned into the dark backgrounds. It was through and through a sensuous delight. Darius Khondji was the cinematographer. But next time Wai needs to add heft to the script, so form and content aren’t so divorced

The film is now available on DVD.