DIRECTORS: Wong Kar-wai
It’s criminal of a critic to give a Wong Kar-wai film less than four stars, the famed Hong Kong director is a legend, perhaps one of the last few standing. This year he was chosen to head the jury at Cannes, the first director from the Sinosphere to receive the honor, and his latest film “My Blueberry Nights” kicked off the Cannes Festival in May, another first. After months of meandering the festival circuit in the West, “Blueberry” finally landed in China on December 22, a homecoming of sorts.

In a way, the film’s journey to the East doubles that of Elizabeth, the film’s main character, played by singer Norah Jones. In the film she, too, goes through a journey. From a greasy spoon diner in Manhattan (run by Jude Law) to a bar in Memphis to a flash casino in Vegas to Venice Beach, California, then back to Manhattan where it all dissolves into dream. Jones, in her first screen role, progresses along a similar arc. We can feel her settling into the role of the lovelorn girl adrift in the big, big world. Critics almost universally panned her performance and not without reason: when she learns that her boyfriend has been skulking around with another chick, it feels like she has lost her mobile phone.

From Jude Law’s diner, she launches into the kaleidoscopic road trip phase of the film, tangentially intersecting a variety of lives along the way without much conclusiveness. The cop who frequents her bar ends up a casualty of his obsessive love, while the gambler she befriends (Natalie Portman) turns out to be a scam artist who only scams herself. The characters reveal more about each other than themselves, looping into the film with alienated flourishes. It’s pure Wong Kar-wai. It’s the absolute depth of asymptotic surface. It’s celluloid as fashion statement.

Despite the criticisms, Jones is great as the marker of terminal displacement, she has that hunted look in her eyes. Wong pulled this trick once before, using superstar singer but novice actress Wong Faye in Chungking Express as the witless symbol of unattainable fantasy (any film students out there looking for a quick paper, note how the concept of woman and California ties “Chungking” and “Blueberry” together—are we talking feminist fantasy or Wong’s unconsummated relationship with Hollywood?). The acting doesn’t make great Hollywood fare, but it’s meat and potatoes for cinema-as-art.

The layers are all there and it’s beautifully shot, the three stars are because the formula doesn’t work in the American context. Refiguring the neo-Beat experience in Wong’s vivid palette is a compelling premise, but somehow it doesn’t pull together, despite the A-list cast. Critics complained that the English language métier was to blame, but I don’t think this story was ever meant for America. In an interview Wong himself said the film was essentially Chinese. He had even shot a few scenes with Maggie Cheung in the lead. The transience and ephemera are what Hong Kong was built on.

The China premier is a homecoming, not an ironic one, but rather one that adds a layer of complexity to Wong’s post-colonial romance. For expats in China who are already on a sort of global road trip, it’ll be appreciated for all the right reasons.

-Lee Mack