'My Blueberry Nights' at the Cannes Film Festival

Time Out reports from the world premiere of Wong Kar Wei's new film

May 16 2007

The 60th Cannes Film Festival opens tonight with the world premiere of the first English-language film from Wong Kar Wei, the Hong Kong master of neon-lit romance behind 'Chung King Express', 'In the Mood for Love' and '2046'. For his virgin American adventure, Wong has cast Jude Law and the singer Norah Jones in the mysteriously named 'My Blueberry Nights', a contemporary love story that blends elements of the classic American road movie with a visual style and a concern for emotional longing that could only belong to the director who has become a veteran face at Cannes and a darling of the world art house scene.

It's a filmmaking journey from east to west that offers mixed results for Wong and is likely to disappoint many among his wide international following. This is Wong watered down and plagued with poor performances and weak writing (he co-wrote the film with an American, Lawrence Block). The director's fractured imagination has fun toying with the received imagery of America – overhead subways, yellow cabs, diners, bars, the open road – and resists wandering into that hackneyed territory of Americana that plagues, say, Wim Wenders' recent films 'Million Dollar Hotel' and 'Don't Come Knockin' and is the preserve of many the wide-eyed outsider. Here, the photography by Darius Khondji is at times sublime and always strong, stirring and inventive. Yet, emotionally and dramatically, 'My Blueberry Nights' lacks that very same ingredient that it seeks the most: a beating, longing, devastating heart.

Or two hearts... The fruit of the title, it turns out, is the sweet filling of a pie that twentysomething Elizabeth (Jones) likes to eat late at night at a little Russian cafe in New York that's owned by good-natured Jeremy (Law), a Mancunian who came to America a few years back with the dream of running marathons but whose Russian ex has disappeared into the night, leaving him to serve teas alone. Elizabeth's emotional wiring is similarly frayed: she has just walked out on her boyfriend of five years and symbolically dumped the keys to their apartment in a jar in Jeremy's café that contains many other such bunches, each of them a sign of love lost and found in the city. Elizabeth and Jeremy circle each other, meeting often in this quiet space, sharing pie and stories; Jeremy even steals a quiet kiss from Elizabeth as she sleeps on the counter one night. And then she abruptly leaves town, embarking on a road trip across the country, holding down bar and waitress jobs and always sending postcards back to Jeremy in New York, to where she finally returns after a year away.

Law does nothing here to suggest that he's not one of the most overrated and over-paid actors in the business. His accent and characterisation are so weak that Jeremy's damaged heart and lost soul are about as credible as finding Jude Law serving pie in a New York back street. Jones is more tolerable; her character is more of a blank canvas, a foil and a witness to the various stories she witnesses on the road: David Strathairn's Arnie, a sad, drunken cop who can't come to terms with his separation from Sue (Rachel Weisz), and Natalie Portman's Leslie, a straight-talking poker hustler who finds Elizabeth's credulousness a charming aberration that she takes it upon herself to heal. It's these small roles that stick in the memory (Strathairn and Portman shine; Weisz less so); and neither Jones nor Law offer equal charisma, both sinking too deeply into their character's passivity. We're meant to think that Elizabeth is reshaping herself, pulling herself back together in the shadow of these strangers to carve a new identity or at least a new strength for herself, but there's barely any sense that she changes throughout the film. She maintains the same gentle, blank demeanour and barely reacts to the world around her leaving us wondering what was the point of the road journey that we've just encountered in the first place.

The gulf between images and ideas is disconcertingly wide, with Khondji's photography and Wong's mise-en-scene standing head and shoulders above the rest of the film. Jones' bland songs add an unwelcome tint of mediocrity to proceedings and some weak motifs – keys, doors, the open road – remain awkward and unexplored. This is not a bad film, but it's an uninspiring watch that lacks romance and is not a patch on what we've come to expect from Wong. Call it creative travel sickness, but this is Wong with the sexual and emotional clout taken out.

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