The Pagan Agenda

Rating:

As Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights opens and closes, the same bluesy chorus purrs: “the story has been told before”. Clearly there is a higher significance to the lyric, in the way that it alludes to the recurrence of not merely prevailing themes of alienation and longing in Kar-Wai’s romantic canon, but of particular scenes and scenarios, snippets of dialogue, even musical cues, finely ground and revisited in a way that weighs heavily upon those familiar with the director’s oeuvre. We know it has all been done before and yet we keep coming back and allowing ourselves to play out the self-configured archetypes of this – if not auteur – then at least incestuous cinema. I appreciate My Blueberry Nights on this meta-level as one section of a larger tableau where pronounced story elements fix upon certain key events (perhaps of a biographical nature) that characters return to in earnest pantomime.

To speak of this film is to speak of its interrelations to its predecessors. Elizabeth (Norah Jones) and Jeremy (Jude Law) are the metaphoric reincarnation of any number of lovers in Kar-Wai’s universe, their actions, and the actions of the characters that are met along the way all evoke a déjà-vu that is entirely intentional. When a Norah Jones track is played twice in quick repetition we are reminded of California Dreamin’ in Chungking Express, When Elizabeth asks Jeremy to hold onto the key of a past lover we are reminded of cop 633 asking the same of Faye, when Arnie (yet another cop) watches his adulterous wife Sue-Lynn enter the bar it is a virtual superimposition of the same scene in Chungking, as cop 633 and the stewardess awkwardly say their goodbyes in the convenience store, the new beau waiting outside. Kar-Wai’s last film, 2046, was even more obviously a mash-up of material laid out in Chungking Express, In The Mood for Love, The Days of Being Wild, Happy Together, and with this history in mind and with My Blueberry Nights own persistent recurrences, such an inclusion ceases to be anything like an Easter egg for the cinephiles, as far as I am concerned, it IS the movie.

Any ability for this film to operate smoothly without foreknowledge of this atmosphere of recurrence, which is to say any ability for this film to be the break-out American debut of the director’s work, is stymied by this hermetic preoccupation. As a garden variety love story of girl meets boy, girl loses boy, the film pays only lip-service, and despite the outward façade of this kind of film with familiar faces like Jude Law and Natalie Portman, something mercurial waits in the wings, the lucid filmmaking that is Kar-Wai’s signature with slo-mo dissolves and smudgy rain-soaked visuals in cahoots with deceptively random musical cues and poetic bursts of narration, has nothing to do with conventional storytelling.

The critical backlash to My Blueberry Nights has been unrelenting, and some people place the blame on its move to English-speaking America, thus relinquishing one of the perceived enjoyment factors for Anglophones of Kar-Wai’s work, namely its exoticism. Dialogue and narration, which once had the filter of subtitles, now rings false and flowery when heard, cheapening all sense of genuine drama; so the argument goes. To me the fault lies elsewhere, not in its lack of exoticism or any defect of translation, but rather in a subtle yet noticeable shift in storytelling technique. Where previously Kar-Wai was satisfied to ‘show’ character longing and attraction, My Blueberry Nights time and again resorts to ‘telling’ us these emotions through expository dialogue and narration. Perhaps the first-time screenplay collaboration with Lawrence Block has something to do with this change for the worst to Kar-Wai’s successful formula, or perhaps there was a conscious decision by all involved that some concessions would need to be made to appeal to American audiences – the visual qualities of Kar-Wai’s signature could remain but only with a ‘telling’ device of intermittent narration. Chungking’s Faye Wong flippantly discusses music and visiting America, Blueberry’s Jeremy speaks of keys opening metaphorical doors, the blueberry pie being emblematic for the unloved, the unpaid bill as proof of life (unending heavy-handed platitudes) In Kar-Wai’s prior works, love was conveyed through body language, slo-motion visuals, musical cues, furtive glances… the real strengths of his style. Yes there was occasional narration but most of the time it was poetic or inconsequential to forwarding the plot. Blueberry, on the otherhand, uses dialogue and narration in a more pronounced way, taking that same poetic inconsequential talk and using it as the means of articulating the drama of the story explicitly. To make a perhaps strange comparison it is like what happened to M Night Shymalan’s Lady in the Water, a film that transported the ludicrously poetic quality of fairy tales into a real-world situation, made uncomfortable due to it being taken literally. A similar awkwardness pervades Blueberry by this shift in narration and dialogue, wrestling the poetry into some literal exposition function it cannot adequately fulfill. All the same parts of the formula Kar-Wai has used remain in this film, but with this subtle shift the dream world is punctured and met with cries of displeasure. If anything, this film shows just how delicate a balance Kar-Wai has kept up until now.

One of my problems with the film was that I felt 2046 was a perfect acceleration and summation of this eternal recurrence experiment of storytelling and that where better to carry the story then to some distant albeit imaginary future society where the same recurrence appears to go unending. It seems strangely terrestrial and uninspired to return again to the same conventions laid out in his past work, to tell a smaller derivative story that has only the change in location to make it distinct. I also found very little life to the characters, they felt like dolls rearranged to convey basic human emotions. At one point both Jeremy and Elizabeth suffer from nose bleeds from two separate incidents, and I do not grasp what is supposed to be conveyed by this overt depiction of coincidence: are they star-crossed lovers, and if so what exactly is supposed to make me care about them besides the well-worn convenience that both have loved and lost and can share that thread of understanding?

Of course the film looks wet and electric and gorgeous, and if you turn your mind off and let it all wash over you, time will pass effortlessly. Occasionally something inspired emerges, such as the stellar performance of Natalie Portman as a cocky Texan, or Norah Jones’ face with the power to transfix with an extended gaze, and the dizzy heights of the music can make one swoon in and out but it all seems detuned, scraps of a message breaking out of the static. The film goes one way, I go another. I would have preferred the story stayed minimal, fixed on the writing of postcards, the cinematic challenge of telling a love story through the written word – a challenge Kar-Wai is surely suited for. Or when the story suddenly dips into a casino I wanted the film to stay there and eek out an Edward Hopper-like rumination on alienation and isolation among the glittery electric lights and blips and beeps of that nether-region of civilization. Instead the story careens forward, aimless in its pursuit of some quaint reunion of souls, using postcards and casinos as collage material towards its ultimately unsatisfying end. While wondrous things occasionally flow within it, I feel its life force is best appreciated elsewhere in the works that this film so unduly saps.