My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar-wai, 2007)

[rs98762001]

Eh, I've been rumbled. He's "Kar Wai" to me...

[MichaelB]

... unless commenters here are personal acquaintances of the director, isn't referring to him as "Kar-Wai" a bit overly familiar?

Well, it's better than calling him 'Wai', as one of my colleagues did in print recently - the equivalent of calling Jean-Claude Van Damme 'Claude'.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I dunno how it works with French names, but in Chinese people sometimes "detach" part of the given name and use it in a diminutive nickname (e.g. "Ah Wai")...although I doubt your colleague is on those terms with Wong!

Just think, all this confusion could've been avoided if he'd just stuck with "Kelvin Wong."

[manicsounds]

As much as I am a WKW fan, again, it didn't do it for me either. Some very nice shots in the film, but there was just WAY too much strobing. I don't really like the effect too much anyway, but I really didn't know what he was trying to say. The only thing I could think of was that he didn't shoot enough coverage that he had to slow down the frame rate....

Storywise the characters didn't have much depth either. Just couldn't identify with much of them. It seemed more like a 'fun' project to do, working with a talented cast and crew than anything else. More fun in the making than in the watching.

[Cde.]

This film is obviously flawed in ways that have been outlined over the course of this thread: it's too plotted, too obvious, too melodramatic. I still found it to be a very beautiful film. The mood and feel characteristic of Wong still worked for me in this film, diluted or not, and was enough to overcome its shortcomings.

The acting was awkward (which can possibly be explained by this being Wong's first English language film) but the feel of sincerity throughout the whole piece meant this didn't turn out to be much of a problem.

[colinr0380]

Just caught the film and thought it was interesting if not entirely successful. It seemed to me to be in the same vein as 2046 with exactly the opposite problem! While both 2046 and My Blueberry Nights feel like megamixes of Wong Kar-Wai tropes, 2046 felt as if it used its familiar situations and characters as short hands for an audience already familiar with his previous work. It bundled a number of his different themes together in order for them to comment on each other and build into a bigger picture of a world where lots of different stories were playing out - real and fictional; teenage crush and adult infatuation; holding on too tight to memories of past relationships against fears of commitment to future ones preventing love developing in the present, and so on.

My Blueberry Nights similarly felt like a megamix but less to make a big statement and use well known themes as a short hand for audiences familiar to his previous work, but seemingly more to act as an introduction for unfamiliar audiences to 'Wong Kar-Wai style' by getting them up to speed with all his themes that they had missed from his other films. So while 2046 and Blueberry Nights would make a good matched pair of films I think it inevitably was going to lead to disappointment from long term fans, which when combined with the indifference of the general public who weren't approaching the film with relative deference to a master filmmaker and just saw a stilted film using old fashioned (and over done) visual tropes, this likely led to the negative reviews - it failed to fully please a large audience in either sphere. But I don't think it was necessarily a bad idea to use elements from previous films in Blueberry Nights just, like 2046, a disappointment to those wishing for a big jump in ideas rather than a tinkering with plotting and settings.

I suppose that this is something all filmmakers who become famous outside the US have to face when they make their first American based film - do I make a film that is personal and follows on or develops themes of my work, which runs the risk that audiences wonder where I'm coming from because they have not seen my previous films? Or do I rework my 'foreign' oeuvre for my first US film, to introduce audiences to my style and themes; to please the money men as they will feel as if they understand the material I'll be working with rather than frightened that I'll be doing something scary and different; and to give myself some familiar material to hang on to for comfort while working in a foreign language in a foreign culture? I can see why so many directors often choose the latter option, even if doing so leads to an unsatisfying film for new audiences and fans alike, and can occasionally provoke a wholescale reevaluation of a previous career up to that point. I don't think Wong's career needs to be re-evaluated as domino suggests, but I do feel that this points out the danger of re-using ideas that were used in such an original and appropriate manner the first time around, so that the artificiality of construction of the works becomes much more apparent.

That being said, once I got over the above I actually liked My Blueberry Nights a lot!

I don't really have any problems with the acting in My Blueberry Nights. I thought Nora Jones provided a very good centre to the film, and in a way the central performance is the more appropriate one for a newcomer to acting since while her role is the through-line of the film it is the surrounding roles that do more 'performing', while Elizabeth acts as an observer until the final scenes when she becomes a full participant. It is a film about being 'taught' in various ways until you have the experience to take the reigns of life and relationships yourself.

It is also a film about finding the middle ground. Some characters hold on to impossible or long dead relationships in the hope that they may be rekindled (Arnie's tragic longing for Sue Lynne in Memphis has a resonance in Jeremy and Katia's brief reunion back in New York), some like Sue Lynne or the gambler Leslie are fearful of the commitment being the wrong one or being smothered by another that they rebel and thereby lose any chance of love or a relationship with their father.

Elizabeth seems to be moving through this using the characters she meets to develop - she starts as someone afraid at commitment and finding that her boyfriend has given up on her in the meantime and gone off with other women. She seems attracted to yet also runs scared of Jeremy and interestingly becomes a waitress in a restaurant in Memphis - perhaps a sign of her wishing to emulate Jeremy's attitude to life as well as a practical need for money.

This I think is where I would disagree with Antoine Doinel in that certain of these locations are meant to have an interchangeable relationship with each other - the restaurants in New York and Memphis, the bars in Memphis and the town Elizabeth meets Leslie in outside of Las Vegas, the gambling den in the town outside Las Vegas and Las Vegas itself. Elizabeth is moving from being on the outskirts of these places in the first of the pair and then actually participating as a waitress, or in a bar, or in Las Vegas itself before she returns to meet Jeremy again - not just as a sad young woman despairing over the end of a relationship who Jeremy can use for a fling on the rebound, but as an equal and able to consciously share the final kiss with him.

This is where the tropes from previous Wong Kar-Wai films came in to add the structure to the film - of course the short film set in a restaurant that Norah Jones talked about in the extras as having been the primary inspiration for the film, but also Leslie's gambler felt like a younger version of Gong Li's character from 2046; Jeremy's restaurant, his standing still and waiting for her return and Elizabeth's letters back to Jeremy from her journey were reminiscent of the Faye Wong and Takeshi Kaneshiro relationship in Chungking Express; the Sue Lynne and Arnie relationship, with the pining and trying to understand infidelity felt like elements of In The Mood For Love; Elizabeth's eating of a whole pie in despair resonates with the tinned pineapple in Chungking Express and the durian in In The Mood For Love; the idea of New York being a place for non-Americans within America with the British Jeremy and his Russian ex-girlfriend felt similar to Happy Together and Elizabeth's final return to New York and her brief glance at her ex-boyfriend's apartment that is now empty and up for rent reminded me a lot of that deleted 70s scene from In The Mood For Love - the return of someone who had previously left the environment in disgrace in more triumphant circumstances but still with that bitter-sweet edge of nostalgia.

In terms of the music I thought it was interesting that Yumeji's theme got a harmonica remix just as actual Nat King Cole songs could be played, an interesting reversal of In The Mood For Love's method of using Yumeji's theme in its original version while using Brazillian versions of Cole's songs. That seems to suggest that there is always going to be some mix of originality and remixing wherever you go and whatever you do - there is no place where everything is new and untouched, just as there is no place where everything has been done before.

Then you get Nora Jones's Crazy as the new element.

I also liked the withholding of the familiar side wipe motif for moments of despair or tragedy (with the final reveal of Elizabeth back in New York looking at the now empty apartment) and the way that Jeremy's initial kiss of the unconscious Elizabeth is only shown by the crumbs from around her mouth disappearing as he moves away, compared to the top down shot of the kiss itself when she fully participates at the end (while I think this was beautiful I think some of the power of that withholding and then showing was diffused by using the image in the film's publicity).

As I'm not a big fan of 'life expressed through the medium of pie' metaphors I felt that the film stumbled pretty badly in its introductions of all the characters and sub-plots, characterisations and introductions feeling forced when they should have been naturally arising but once the stories got up and running I enjoyed them a lot more that I thought I would, especially having read some of the negative reviews beforehand. Even the collection of keys Jeremy kept in his restaurant that felt introduced in a particularly hamfisted way (although if I later find out that every restaurant in New York has a collection of keys, it might explain the casual way in which this element was introduced!), I thought it paid off beautifully in Jeremy's explanations of where each key came from, which could be real or just a made up stories told to impress Elizabeth.

I also liked the end of the Leslie and Elizabeth subplot - a 'taking different roads' metaphor that could have been head slapping in its obviousness felt quite touching as Leslie travels off without changing down what will probably be a dark path of gambling while Elizabeth learns from Leslie, but mostly learns what she doesn't want to become. It also got me thinking that Leslie might think back occasionally about that strange, trusting girl she met on the way to Las Vegas and wonder if she wasn't as naive as she first considered her to be.


While I can understand the film's failure and think the film relied a bit too heavily on reworking previous material than creating anything particularly new (it is telling that Wong ends his film with the lyric "The stories have all been told before"!) I did end up enjoying the film quite a bit. It is not as original, as seemingly heartfelt (whatever that means) or as substantial as Wong Kar-Wai's other films have felt (though that is often the themes of his films - the way tiny, insignificant moments have the longer lasting impact than any major plot development), and does suffer from a number of clunky set ups, but I think it is a nice addition to his filmography and certainly should not be considered as a sell-out film. More (ironically) a gamble that didn't pay off but at the same time didn't leave the gambler completely destitute, just back where they started.

[kupo]

Interesting thoughts, colin. I agree with a lot of what you said.

For me, 2046 was, in a lot of ways, a ne plus ultra for Wong. It is, in my opinion, his second best film after the nearly flawless In the Mood for Love (which I watched again recently, and I swear, every time I see it I'm just blown away by how impeccable it is...). 2046 is a very meta movie, not only in how it references Wong's other films, but, as Stephen Teo has suggested, how it is very much a movie about Wong himself, and his working style and career. It is his own trip to 2046, absolutely dense with intertextual reference that is not at all simple pastiche, but rather creates an expanding web of meaning. It is a film that is the perfect crystallization of the filmmaker's themes and working habits.

But having reached this terminal point, the excessive intertextuality of My Blueberry Nights felt distinctly less...necessary. Still not necessarily a bad thing (as I said earlier, I quite love that Wong's films obsess over one another in the ways his characters do), but, still, being that these intertextual devices were explored so thoroughly in his previous film, his implication of them here needed to be flawless for them to not feel extraneous. Unfortunately, that did not happen.

But I agree: the degree to which this has made others question Wong's past success is ridiculous, and, I think, simply indicates a massive lack of critical understanding about how his films have always functioned. Ultimately, I think this is a poor film, but by no means a disaster that casts its shadow over the man's entire career. An inconsequential hiccup at most.

[colinr0380]

But having reached this terminal point, the excessive intertextuality of My Blueberry Nights felt distinctly less...necessary. Still not necessarily a bad thing (as I said earlier, I quite love that Wong's films obsess over one another in the ways his characters do), but, still, being that these intertextual devices were explored so thoroughly in his previous film, his implication of them here needed to be flawless for them to not feel extraneous. Unfortunately, that did not happen.

Yes, it felt as if the tropes of previous films were being used more as a safety blanket in My Blueberry Nights rather than feeling like an exciting and motivated return to old themes in order to create something new from seeing their various conjunctions, as in 2046.

It also felt more forced in My Blueberry Nights maybe due to the necessity of having to provide believable introductions to the character's situations that just weren't believeable. Once you get over the initial shock of the "Jude Law's running a cafe where he keeps tons of keys left behind by patrons/Natalie Portman is a smart mouthed gambler in a flimsy dress/David Strathairn is married to Rachel Weisz and they're all doing familiar actions from previous classic Wong Kar-Wai films with familiar but slightly different music" and the characters begin to assert themselves over the actor's personas and the references back to earlier films there is quite a touching film there. It is a big inital leap to make (and has to be made over and over again as each episode of Elizabeth's journey starts up) but at least each section ends in a better way than it began.

The film might also work better when it is seen as part of the Wong Kar-Wai canon, rather that his 'latest and greatest' film, which is a burden it cannot really carry (not even 2046 could carry that burden for some people!)

It would be interesting to see if the film could work as an introduction to Wong Kar-Wai films, but then again I don't see any problem with just telling any interested newcomers to go straight for Chungking Express or In The Mood For Love instead rather than starting with the regurgitated, though still tasty, leftovers that My Blueberry Nights sometimes sadly represents on its surface.

[zedz]

I'm real late to this bonfire, but there wasn't a hell of a lot of encouragement to put this film at the top of any must-see list, and now I understand why.

It's not so much a disaster as a complete non-event, and like domino, it's worrying in that it's close enough to Wong's older, better films that it causes you to question your appreciation for them. It's like a bad American indie made by a director who's seen too many Wong Kar-wai films.

Biggest problems:

The Script - Wong's improvisatory shooting and editing style with previous films has rarely delivered narratively complex films, but at least it's had the advantage of keeping the individual beats and performances fresh. This film is not just simplistic, it's trite to the bone, and the individual stories and relationships wouldn't be out of place on a 1970s compendium TV show like The Love Boat. Come to think of it, that's what this whole film resembles: a bad TV pilot - The Love Cafe, in which hunky agony aunt Jude Law solves the romantic problems of two visitors to his cafe every week.

The Performances - Norah Jones is just a non-entity on screen, rarely even rising to mediocre, and the film is, not coincidentally, tolerable according to how much or little she's involved from minute to minute. As noted by just about everybody, Rachel Weisz is terrible in a different way, overplaying every scene. The two of them seem to me to exhibit two different strains of Bad TV Acting, and they're not even bad in an interesting way. I thought Strathairn was pretty negligible, though he's hampered by playing against that particular tag team of nothing. Jude Law has a similar problem. He's likeable enough, but almost all of his time is spent playing against Norah Jones or - same thing, really - nobody. Portman's the best of the main cast: even though her character is pretty thin, at least she brings some energy to her. But the best performance by far, in probably the only good scene in the film, is Chan Marshall in her irrelevant bit as Law's ex (this is also, not surprisingly, his best scene by far). It's not much as written, but Marshall is the only performer to offer the kind of idiosyncrasy and watchability that Wong could have built a film around. If she'd swapped places with Jones, I reckon he would have ended up with a much stronger film, or no film at all, given the funding challenge. Either way, we the audience would probably have been better off.

The Music - Wong really seems to have descended into self-parody at this point, and the hooking of each location on a single song, repeated ad nauseam, was a reflex tic with none of the wit or energy that inflected the use of 'California Dreaming' in Chungking Express, say. Worst offender was the abuse of Otis Redding, since we rehear 'Try a Little Tenderness' (which is too pointed a lyric in the first place) over and over while never getting to the climax of the song (which is, like, the raison d'etre of that track). Talk about a dry hump! I started laughing every time I heard it, because the whole thing was so tin-eared and bone-headed.

I think the points made above about the indistinguishable neon-lit 80s-music-video sets that flatten out the different locations are also well observed, but the three things above are the torpedo hits that sunk this film for me.

[colinr0380]

While I'm not quite as harsh as zedz (what did you think of the 'pie as a metaphor for life' angle to the film zedz? Thats one of the wierdest, most irritating, tropes of the 2000s that I have been able to note so far, as found also in Waitress and Pushing Daisies, and is the thing that irritated me the most about the film, more than Weisz's performance!) it seems that Blueberry managed to stall Wong Kar-wai's career for years. We can only hope that The Grandmasters might be a return to form.

[MichaelB]

I completely agree with the "not so much a disaster as a complete non-event" summary - in my S&S review I referred to "the pervasive impression that My Blueberry Nights never really needed to be made."

[Zot!]

I revisited this again, just to see if my initial grave disappointment was justified, and I would have to say yes, very much so. I find it excruciating for all the reasons that zedz nicely articulated. I am in the disaster rather than non-event camp however, and descending into bad parody.