Blueberry Nights and Black Asphalt Days

So, back to work. Idle hands find time to write, but the hands of the overly employed find time only to flick the TV remote before bedtime. Now that I have two jobs more than when I started to write the blog, the consistency of output has noticeably diminished. Not that anybody should notice I think… because (wait for it) I am about to write yet another review of a movie that is likely not on anybody’s radar. That’s right! A movie by a relatively obscure director that will scarcely be remembered in the mainstream. Maybe that should be the title of my blog. “Barrett’s Reviews of Oddy-Knocky Shit That Nobody’s Heard of.” More to come in the future to be certain.

Regardless, I have watched this week a movie I have been waiting for for quite a long time. Since it played at Cannes over a year ago, I have been looking forward to Wong Kar-Wai’s “My Blueberry Nights.” This is without argument the best movie title to exist in years. I can’t even remember the last movie title to compare. This brilliantly colored film concerns a young woman, who after her boyfriend leaves her for another woman, begins a trek across America to remove herself from her broken relationship and to find herself in a clearer image. Its the classic road movie. The major difference here is the gorgeous color and imagery the immensely talented director ladles upon us.

His first English-language film, he has mostly been noted previously for In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express. His movies often deal with dejected young characters, often in positions of a life transition or a position of love or affection that cannot be properly displayed. Blueberry Nights is no different, except for the fact that it’s now an American mythos he’s dealing with. His Hong Kong films dealt with a Chinese mythos that was a more reserved and traditional style, more often centered around a male character, and often ending with a love unspoken. Honor and dignity were usually kept well intact.

In the wild wild west however, he’s free to explore a much different angle, while keeping structurally similar. Here the main protagonist is a woman, played by blues maestro and first time actress Norah Jones. After being two-times by her boyfriend, she leaves New York on a whim, but not before befriending Jude Law who runs a local diner which seems to be a nexus for broken hearts. Law keeps behind the counter a jar filled with keys, dropped off by halves of former couples who expect them to be sought at the diner. Just in case they’re being looked for, Law keeps the keys ready. When Jones drops off her keys to be picked up, she finds a friendly ear in Law who lends her some relationship wisdom in the form of pie slices. The title refers to the time she’s spending with Law eating the leftover blueberry pie nobody wanted.

She then begins a trek across America meeting interesting characters along the way, such as a alcoholic policeman who drinks to forget his wife, a wife who sleeps around to forget her husband, and a card shark who won’t take a gamble on her own personal life. Its stuff you’ve likely seen before, the road movie genre is a playground for such situations, people in search of themselves find people who inadvertently or even advertently teach the protagonist about themselves in ways they never could have predicted. Lessons are learned, wisdom is shared.

In many ways this film is quite similar to another classic American road movie called Paris, Texas. In Paris the story concerned a drifter who is hospitalized after collapsing in a desert-town cafe. His forgotten family comes to pick him up and care for him, and slowly his past comes into sharper focus. The drifter, played by Harry Dean Stanton, hit the road in the first place when he couldn’t stand the torment of jealousy surrounding his siren of a wife played by Nastassja Kinski. You see, she’s the kind of woman who drives a man crazy, even without going so far as to fool around. She just has to be apart from him. This very storyline is mirrored in Blueberry Nights with the David Straithairn and Rachel Weisz characters. Kar-Wai even goes as far as to give Weisz the same wild, tousled hairdo that Kinski wears in her film. Paris, Texas was incidentally directed by another foreign-born master filmmaker, German-born Wim Wenders, who was also making his English-language debut.

The American road and the elusive American Mystique seem to be quite attractive to foreign audiences and directors. Perhaps not so incidentally, Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) is coming to Hollywood to direct a Francis Ford Coppola-produced adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. The last bastion of the Wild West is the great expanses of two-lane blacktop that spans our mammoth continent. Spotted alongside these roads on foot, in cars, or in roadside diners exist the sort of existential human detritus that make these films so memorable. Along the way these characters drop into the picture and then disappear like apparitions only to re-assimilate with the Great Road. Such is the road movie, such is its formless beauty.

However… never has a road movie looked like this. Never have we seen one with such a colorful vibrancy, with such a visual style, with such panache! Kar-Wai fills the frame with colors that blister through the screen a thousand at a time. Joy in life is seeing a Wong Kar-Wai film for the first time. The visuals in a film like this come only once for the first time, and then you can only repeat the experience like you would remember your first kiss. It becomes nostalgia. But thank God for the masses that there are so many of his films yet to be discovered. And also that there are so many more to come! He is now planning a remake of Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai as his next English language feature, and I wait with bated breath for the beauty that it will surely behold.