Film

Swirls of gooey ice cream (and a candy-colored palette to match), coupled with adorable actors making cute in diners to soft indie music: The trouble with Wong Kar-wai’s latest isn’t that it’s too reminiscent of his earlier work, so much as it’s too reminiscent of a bad Wim Wenders film. Has Wong always been this obnoxiously hipsterish? Ugh, don’t answer that—especially since My Blueberry Nights, the Hong Kong mood master’s first film in English, will prompt many other similarly painful questions. Did he not know that babyish Jude Law has yet to find a persuasive role—certainly not as a Manhattan bartender and proprietor? Or that casting pop stars like Norah Jones generally results in an oppressive vacancy?

Inexplicably, the lovesick pair must go their separate ways after hitting it off sensationally. This means Jones’s Elizabeth heads out on one of those rambling road trips so significant to foreign directors making films about America. Soon enough, we’re in Memphis, where David Strathairn turns up in what might be called the Harry Dean Stanton role; later, we’re outside Las Vegas (duh), in the bleach-blond company of poker hustler Natalie Portman. All of these groaner developments, coscripted by Wong and crime novelist Lawrence Block, feel like a tour of the waxiest 1990s clichés ever: When Portman and Jones end up driving a convertible toward the setting Western sun, you pray for a cliff to appear before them. Shrouded in the gorgeous scrims of Darius Khondji’s cinematography, Wong seems quite nude.