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Wong Kar
Wai is one director who deserves to brand a film with
his name. “A Wong Kar Wai Film.” He is not the best—some
will no doubt argue otherwise—but a film made by Kar Wai
is outstandingly different, presenting us with
characters with their odd choices, like a blueberry pie
in an array of ordinary options.
Expectations can kill a film, but in the case of Wong
Kar Wai expectations only heighten what we expect of
him. In My Blueberry Nights, the first English
feature film of the director, Kar Wai is back with his
signature shots: individuals engrossed in themselves and
the camera also engrossed in the inwardness of these
people; landscapes that are no mere backgrounds but
running—or, if you wish, barely moving—commentaries on
the events transpiring with such stillness you feel the
cameraman is half-meditating, half-recording; and tones
and hues in watercolor lightness making tender the
themes of ugly separation, unwanted separation, denied
separations.
“Try a
Little Tenderness,” that’s what the unofficial theme
song of the film says.
HYPNOTIC.
Bearing Wong Kar
Wai’s languid, moody aesthetic,
My Blueberry Nights
benefits from the solid work of its ensemble of actors,
including the jazz singer Norah Jones and David
Strathairn.
Like his
In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar Wai’s story, which
begins outside a diner and eventually ends there, is a
mood—a long soulful, bluesy mood that gets stretched to
tautness that you want it to burst till kingdom come.
The mood does burst but not before we are seduced into
its soft tales about hardy women and the men they love
and hate and love. As for the men, in Wong Kar Wai’s
film they are as much downtrodden as they are unknowing
victims of a relationship they always believe they
manage well to fruition or destruction.
The film
begins with a woman, Elizabeth, entering a café.
In that place, a young man, Jeremy, almost shy and
neutral, has a bundle of keys, each bundle a story, a
love story. The woman waiting for her man hands in her
keys to be picked up by the lover. The keys remain
uncollected and the woman keeps returning to check on
the keys.
Elizabeth—or Lizzie—is hiding one fact: that her man is
seeing another woman. Which means that her keys will
remain there in the café, a story waiting to be retold.
In the meantime, the woman hies off away from New York,
ending up in a bar in another diner at daytime and a bar
during nighttime in Memphis.
Literally, the day and the night in that place are
bipolar atmospheres of the pleasant and the unpleasant,
good and evil, light and darkness. In the bar, a woman
encounters a customer who stays last. Both lonely and
reclusive, Lizzie and this solitary figure with his
whiskey talk with each other.
When
daytime comes in the diner, which serves as the “day
job” of the woman, the reclusive figure appears. He is
your ordinary small-town cop, friendly and ultimately
sociable.
In the
bar, so many things happen. Like one night, a woman
appears and everyone in the bar turns around to have a
look at this being whose entrance is more catwalk than
drama. She has something to do with the cop, and it is
not a good something.
Tragic
events take place in the bar. Lizzie sees all of these,
but she is a Greek chorus without a voice. She instead
starts to write a letter to Jeremy, whose impulse is to
look for all the bars in Memphis where an Elizabeth may
be working. Jeremy soon realizes that his better option
is to write back.
Lizzie,
this time, encounters another character, a young woman
aged at the gambling table. The female gambler loses and
leaves the table, and comes back to the table and loses
again. Beside her, Lizzie should look like a winner but
for some reason, the daring and the insouciance of the
gambler makes her troublingly attractive. The gambler
does not trust anyone and Lizzie seems to trust just
everyone. The metaphor of life as a gamble is almost
literal at this point.
Where
does the blueberry pie come in? Jeremy in their initial
encounter talks about how so many cakes and pies are all
consumed in that café. But the blueberry pie remains
unsold always at the end of the day. Jeremy offers this
maxim: it is not the fault of the blueberry pie that no
one wants it.
I don’t
know how true the marketing maxim of Jeremy is. I
believe the blueberry pie is a cultivated taste with its
mix of the sour and the creamy. On film, sayings glibly
delivered by a lonesome lad like Jeremy is a dangerous
beginning of a work that should either go camp or cute.
But Wong Kar Wai always has his way with moods and
music, and with dark tales about love.
The film
is slow at the beginning, hastens nervously toward the
early middle, shimmers with fun later and ends with a
very lambent, buttery, almost gooey kiss. The film has
its main character traveling but Wong Kar Wai and his
filmmaking that is devoted to capturing the loveliness
of the frame as well as the contents does not allow us
to be with the jolt and crash and rush of the trip. He
makes us the omniscient gossip, uncaring about what will
happen at the end of this film. It is thus not
surprising that in the murderous violence at the bar,
the lead fighters are devoid of neurosis. Strange,
however, is the other effect of this approach, for when
we see the wretchedness of people destined to destroy
each other when together, we see first the physical pain
before we behold the battered hearts.
My
Blueberry Nights
benefits from actors whose sensitivity and presence
resolutely keep the film from turning into a pastry shop
of sketches. Norah Jones, the jazz singer, has a lovely
face that is nonjudgmental. She looks at the world
around her and we know the goodness in that face can
survive the badness of the things she is looking at.
Jude Law disappears in a solitude that is neither
philosophical nor pathological. His Jeremy is a man who
is caught in a transit area forever. We wish him well
and luck and love because we know he will look good in
being happy. Two characters run away with their
intensely private demons: David Strathairn is
heart-wrenching as Arnie Copeland, cop at day and
alcoholic at night. Seeing him during daytime makes one
wish that night does not come for this man. But night
does come and with it his wife, Sue Lynne. As the cop’s
wife, Rachel Weisz steals our heart. She does not know
if she hates Arnie and she does not know what she can
do. It is for her that the song “Try a Little
Tenderness” should be offered. Somewhere between day and
night is Natalie Portman, whose character loses at card
games and loses us, the audience.
Wong Kar
Wai is credited for the screenplay of My Blueberry
Nights with Lawrence Block. |
