Love and memory, loss and identity, departures and returns. All blurred with neon lights, closed spaces, vast open spaces. Wong Kar Wai, a cinematic master at spontaneous, unscripted filmmaking that breathes from the screen as if it's a balm for your heart. Ok, yes, perhaps this is too sentimental of a description for a director's style, but Wong Kar Wai's films are seductive, nostalgic, powerful.
My Blueberry Nights, Wong Kar Wai's first English-language feature and first film set in the USA, is based on a short film about two people meeting in a diner. Simple, right? Well, not so much. The blurred, freeze-then-slow motion sequences, the noises of doors closing and opening, trains leaving and passing, all of the cinematic accessories point to a complicated identity and a torn heart. This is a story of Elisabeth, a broken-hearted girl who looks for sweet comfort in a blueberry pie. There is always leftover blueberry pie at the end of night, but rarely you can find apple pie or chocolate desserts. “Nothing wrong with the blueberry pie it’s just that people make other choices, no one wants it”.
Elisabeth keeps coming back to a small Soho coffee house (although we don’t see any of the characteristically New York screen shots, other than a passing yellow cab) owned by Jeremy (Jude Law). Acting a bit wiser, perhaps because his break-up is not so recent, or because he often sees broken-hearts walk into his coffee shop and even documents them in a jar full of keys that will never be re-used. As he tells Elisabeth the story of a couple to be married that split and she asks what happened, Jeremy responds: “Life happened. Things happened. Time happened.” And the opening and closing song, “This is just how it goes” reminds us of just letting go….As those doors are closed, even if we have the physical keys. Fittingly, the coffee shop is called “Kljuc” – Russian for keys. And also fittingly that it is Russian as the Slavs are often known experts at soul searching, suffering and Dostoyevski-esque split character developments.
There is nothing that the road can’t heal. “How do you say goodbye to someone you can’t imagine living without? I didn’t say goodbye, I didn’t say anything. I just walked away.” So Elisabeth embarks on a road trip across America. Untypical of American road trips, she goes alone. But she sends postcards, updates about her emotional state, to no other than Jeremy. She just needs somebody to express herself to, she is not looking for communication, for feedback, for his response. She just wants someone who can listen to her. First stop: Memphis, Tennessee. Two jobs, so that she has less time to think about him. In Memphis, where we hear a lots and lots of blues, we find the story of Arnie and his ex-wife Sue Lynne (the ever so sensual Rachel Weisz). And here I borrow a line from a fellow film critic: “As in his other films, Wong examines relationships that remain stubbornly difficult for both people, and the impossibility of being free of emotional bonds, set against a soundtrack featuring Otis Redding singing "Try a Little Tenderness".”. Next stop: Nevada. Here, we find the daredevil untrusting gambling loving Leslie (Natalie Portman). As the landscape widens from small closed restaurant sequences to vast Nevada roads fields, Elisabeth starts healing. Leslie, just like Elisabeth, seeks an escape and in a way “uses” Elisabeth to go where she cannot go alone (her dad’s death bed).
Wong Kar Wai said that this film is ultimately about letting go. Such a difficult decision, letting go of something, but it has to be done. And so our heroine does at the end of her sweet journey. At the end she knows what she wants and she comes back to reclaim her kiss. And so Wai gives us one of the best, tastiest and most symmetric screen kisses on film.
