On DVD at Sunny’s house with Lucía, Ben, and Sunny, on 26 March 2008, at around 20 o’clock.
This wasn’t as bad as I anticipated, but it still wasn’t very good. WKW seemed to be trying to return to the same kind of filmmaking he had become so good at in Chungking Express, and while the story was mostly good and there were a lot of moments in the film that were distinctly WKW, the film fell flat for me in the delivery of the dialogue (which often felt like it would have worked better as subtitles than spoken) and especially in the overuse of certain trademark WKW schticks that didn’t always seem appropriate in the context.
The way the film was put together often seemed quite rough. Frequently after starting some song at the end of a scene and soaking in some mood for a second or two, there would be an abrupt cut and a rather jarring transition to the setup for the next scene, and before long I started to feel like I was being rushed through the film or that WKW was going through the motions without committing to the mood or the emotional impact of some story element. One of the few places where WKW took enough time was in Rachel Weisz’ crying scene, which unfortunately came across so poorly that I wished it was over as soon as it started.
One of the best scenes in the film was Cat Power’s brief scene with Jude Law. In just a few short minutes, she almost stole the film from Norah Jones (who was already a compelling screen presence, even if she is no Faye Wong). The worst part of the film began the moment Natalie Portman entered it and ended the moment she left it. This is partly because she can’t act her way out of a paper bag, but much more than that it’s simply that her part sucked. There was a faint echo of Thelma and Louise, some tedious poker scenes, several scenes that could easily have been car commercials and a homoerotic motel scene that didn’t really feel necessary.
The photography was top-notch. Some parts of the film were merely photographed well, and others parts left a strong visual impression on my mind that will probably outlive the rest of the film (especially in Jude Law’s café and in the Memphis bar that Arnie drinks himself to death in). I have long considered Darius Khondji to be Christopher Doyle’s equal, and it’s interesting to see him work with WKW. There were a lot of step-printed shots—way too many for my taste—but the choppy kind, not the blurry kind that WKW used to great effect in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels (did he use it in Happy Together?).
I’m curious where WKW’s career is going. In many ways Blueberry Nights simply felt sloppy. Was he worn out from working too hard on 2046? Was it the difficulty of working in English? Was it the people he was working with? Is he going to continue to try to make the style of films that he perfected in the 90s, or is he going to move on?
After watching, I made the mistake of popping Chungking Express and Fallen Angels into the DVD play to watch some of his use of step printing for comparison, and saw abruptly how much better each scene was assembled in those films than in My Blueberry Nights. It’s a bit like watching The Phantom Menace and then skimming through one’s favorite scenes from the original Star Wars trilogy.
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