Ray Pride

Film directors rarely indulge in wholesale revision of their work; so-called director's cuts going back to a baggier version of what's in the theaters, yes, but a wholesale rethinking, no.

Wong Kar-Wai seems to have done it on almost every project he's tackled, including "Ashes of Time," his little-seen martial-arts epic from 1994. Attempting to piece together scattered bits of the source material in order to preserve the negative, Wong decided that rather than to simply add the material that had been omitted into the cut, he would rethink it according to his current perspective, the results of which should be done later this year. In the meantime, there's "My Blueberry Nights," his first feature in English, which premiered to small acclaim at Cannes 2007. I saw this 111-minute version in November at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, and it's much less tidy than the ninety-minute version Wong cut for the American market; fewer voice-overs, shorter takes of dreamy imagery. On a second viewing of the shorter cut, "Blueberry" seems less substantial than you'd hope from a filmmaker like Wong, yet its American-set story comes out less like Wim Wenders-style romanticism of the endless expanses of the American West than a conflation of his Hong Kong sensibilities and the New York ones of his co-writer, the novelist Lawrence Block.

Elizabeth (Norah Jones) is a heartbroken woman who wanders into the lower Soho café of expat Jeremy (Jude Law) one night, and continues to come in for pie and ice cream and coffee and wispy conversations about fate and the like. Elizabeth soon takes to the road, hitting Memphis and Vegas, taking on a different diminutive in each city, watching the emotional battles of others wherever she goes and penning postcards back to Jeremy, who has no way of reciprocating her messages.

Several times Wong shoots Elizabeth falling asleep on Jeremy's counter, photographing her part-Indian features like an odalisque, and in late scenes where Jones wears a green knit hat, she resembles the statues in Angkor Wat, Cambodia, where Wong ends "In the Mood for Love." Jeremy's café, for that matter, resembles the storefront restaurants and noodle shops in old Hong Kong, slightly battered, wearing its age with down-at-heel grace. (Wong tells me the shop has since been closed, but the owner treasures the film, knowing that it preserved a moment in its existence.)

The Memphis passage includes a battle between a married couple who drank to stay together, a policeman played by David Straitharn and the young woman he once pulled over, played by Rachel Weisz. Superficially, there's a tincture of Tennessee Williams in the battle that "Lizzie" watches with wide-eyed concern, but it also aligns with Block's procedural novels, in which his characters are often stricken with the spirit that comes in a bottle. Sadness stops the cop, but drink is what keeps him foolishly hopeful. (A death occurs in this passage, and the provisional roadside memorial to the character resembles nothing less than the Chinese funerary memorials you see scattered all across Hong Kong and China.)

We talk photography for a while, not so much the substitution of French cameraman Darius Khondji for his usual cinematographer Chris Doyle, but possible influences. Edward Hopper is obvious in the color palette, but Wong cites William Eggleston, Robert Frank and amusingly, Weegee, the poet maudit of the New York 1940s noir night. The influences add up to something greater than the whole; one of the best grace notes, beyond the recurrent refrain of Cat Power's "The Greatest," is her apparition one night as Jeremy's ex-girlfriend (under her real name, Chan Marshall). While some reviewers didn’t care for Wong's pensees in English rather than seen in subtitles (and this version clears out some of the lesser musing), Marshall manages to do the most with her twangy delivery, hitting syllables like notes of music.

Does he remember the various cuts, I ask, that he provides to different territories around the world? Not really, he says. Most importantly, he adds, is that he looks at each assembly as the person he is at that moment, without trying to recapture who he might have been when he shot it or when he first cut the picture. His forgetting: our remembering.

"My Blueberry Nights" opens Friday.

(2008-04-15)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
A keenly acted melodrama, Eva Aridjis’ debut feature, "The Favor," finds middle-aged Lawrence (Frank Wood) the adoptive parent of the son of a woman from his past, Johnny (Ryan Donowho)
(2008-04-08)

Uplifting the Nightingale
Helmeted cyclists stream along Milwaukee Avenue below Division Friday night in a soft blue dusk with the smell of spring, almost. I can't find the screening space opening in the next hour or so. The subway whooshes under the grated sidewalk. The loiterers outside Crater Liquors aren't likely to know. Even with directions from a smiling passerby— "The screening's that way!"—I walk past the Nightingale twice: a ground-floor space with sliding patio doors covered with sheets of black paper and an eight-by-ten page announcing the screening
(2008-04-08)

Tip of the Week
There are many such grand moments in James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty's "The Singing Revolution," a comprehensive primer on the role of song in Estonian culture, and how its manifestations at the end of the Cold War led to the ejection of the Soviet occupiers, reaffirms the power of song and of protest
(2008-04-01)

Sees the Day
Thirty million surveillance cameras. Four billion hours of video a week. Two hundred sightings of you, me and everyone we know each and every day. These are the sturdy statistics that open Adam Rifkin's low-budget "Look," burdened with a mini-Post-It of a title that sounds like a studio remaking a minor J-horror entry starring Luke Wilson
(2008-03-25)

Tip of the Week
(2008-03-25)

Tip of the Week
(2008-03-18)

And the Band Played On
(2008-03-11)

Now and When
(2008-03-11)

Tip of the Week
(2008-03-11)

A month of art from old Europe
(2008-03-05)

Tip of the Week
(2008-03-05)

Tip of the Week
(2008-02-26)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment