Eyes on the Pies

Norah Jones wanders through My Blueberry Nights in a daze.

by Sam Adams

BAKE IT TO ME GENTLY: Jude Law comforts Norah Jones with sugary sentiments and desserts after she splits from her boyfriend. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

My Blueberry Nights is Wong Kar-wai's first American movie, but not quite in the way you might expect. True, the movie was shot in the U.S., in New York, Memphis and Nevada, and the actors speak English. But for Wong, the particularities of language and location are less important than the nuances of texture and hue, the sensual details that call a memory up from the depths.

Nights is Wong's first movie in a decade to be set in the present day, but it still feels as if it were retrieved from some other time and place. Due in part to a brief shooting schedule — a piddling seven weeks, compared to the years Wong tinkered with his previous features, 2046 and In the Mood for Love — the movie was filmed on practical locations rather than elaborately art-directed sets. But the real places, like Earnestine & Hazel's bar in Memphis, feel somehow abstracted, as if they've been boiled down to their essence and reconstituted from scratch.

Wong has said that he devised the story, an extension of a short film shown at Cannes in 2001, out of a desire to work with Norah Jones. Jones, who had never acted before being cast in the lead, is a strange choice for Wong, who generally likes his heroines passionate, impetuous and a little short-tempered. Onscreen, Jones is as pleasant and mild as her music: pretty and sad and forgettable. Wong and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, exploit Jones' voluptuous lips to swooning effect, but when the script requires her to move them, the movie screeches to a halt.

Jones plays Elizabeth, a jilted New Yorker who seeks solace in a coffee shop owned by Jeremy (Jude Law, who slathers his words with a thick Mancunian accent). When he's not serving pie, Jeremy acts as an emissary between estranged lovers; a bowl on his counter is filled with unclaimed house keys, left for exes who can't bear, or won't bother, to pick them up. After Jones spies her boyfriend canoodling with another, she adds his keys to the pool, and asks Jeremy why he still keeps so many sets that will never be claimed. "If I threw these keys away," he says, "then those doors would be closed forever."

That kind of tendentious, overheated line is, sadly, par for the course in My Blueberry Nights, whose script Wong co-wrote with crime novelist Lawrence Block. Wong seems to have conceived it not just as a movie set in America but a movie in an American style, with the broad-stroke acting and double-underlined dialogue of a Nora Ephron comedy. It's hard to know how else to account for its daffy, dazed tone, so different from the violent, surging emotion of Wong's past. The movie's title comes from a Law monologue about pies that manages to make Waitress seem edgy.

Her flirtation with Jeremy unconsummated — notwithstanding the moment he licks ice cream from her swollen lips as she sleeps — Elizabeth hits the road, changing names as she goes. In Memphis, where she ministers to an alcoholic cop (David Strathairn) who is trying to drown out the end of his marriage to a volcanic sexpot (Rachel Weisz), she is Lizzie; in Nevada, where she hooks up with a bottle-blond Texas gambler (Natalie Portman), she is Beth. But if the movie means to suggest that she is changing her character with each stop on her journey, Jones lacks the range to suggest any kind of reinvention. Wong stresses her innocence, her guileless features and open smile, but she seems more blank than pure.

Despite the absence of Wong's longtime cameraman Christopher Doyle, My Blueberry Nights is no less beguiling a sight than his previous films. Khondji shoots through rain-spattered shop windows to add a layer of dreamy remove, and makes every corner glow with a heady intensity. (Jeremy owns the only coffee shop in the world whose dessert case flickers acid green.) His shots of melted ice cream coursing through canyons of cherry-pie filling are the most erotic thing in the movie, so sexually charged they're almost filthy. It's not uncommon in Wong's frames for objects to receive more attention than people, but this is the first time the actors have been outdone by pastry.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

My Blueberry Nights
Directed by Wong Kar-wai
A Weinstein Company release