My Blueberry Nights Misses the Mark

Asian Director Wong Kar-Wai's Unique Style Fails to Translate

Nov 30, 2008

In his English lnaguage debut, director Wong Kar-Wai fails to create the distinct romantic spark that captured filmgoers hearts in his Asian language films.

Asian filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai is a brilliant visual stylist. As with all great directors such as Jean Luc Godard, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, you know exactly whose world you have entered upon sight of the first frame. It therefore may not appear that way upon first glance, but Wong's films have spoken more about the state of Chinese culture and society than any other Asian filmmaker that comes to mind.

Wong's Structural Approach to Telling a Story

At heart, Wong is a hopeless romantic, exploring personal sadness, and yearning for a better time, a happier place, a lost love. His stories are thus compelled, not by plot, but by creating a visual interpretation of the mood of his protagonist(s). In the past, Wong has used this mode of storytelling in order to explore the frailty of Asian culture.

Films like the Chung King Express (1994) and 2046 (2004) are sloppy, fragmentary, confusing and sometimes maddeningly opaque, but they tell the tales of lonely men, searching for lost loves, trying to survive in a society in constant flux, devoid of human connection, constantly searching for a cultural identity that it can never find.

These films stand in as allegories for the state of Asian society which possessed these same characteristics. They aren’t great films and they don't even begin to operate as cinematic wholes, but when taken within this context, they manage to touch an emotional nerve regardless. Not to mention the stark visual and poetic beauty at hand.

Wong Kar-Wai: Lost in Translation

Since Wong's foreign films were not simply character studies, but social allegories, his transition to Hollywood with My Blueberry Nights (2007), was not a smooth one.

The film revolves around Elizabeth (Norah Jones) who, after venting to an afterhours cafe owner played by Jude Law about a failed romance, decides to take a cross country journey from New York in hopes of being reborn into independence.

The story operates on the same level as Wong's previous works: a fragmentary, symbolic journey told, not through character of dialogue, but romantic symbolism and visual inflection. However, when taken out of the Asian context, what was once forgivable about this approach now becomes an unforgivable vice.

In Asia, Wong was a hopeless romantic yearning to find an identity in a culture that doesn’t have one. In America he is simply a whimsical daydreamer trying desperately to fill 90 minutes. Take the diner setting in the Cung King Express, which was the perfect backdrop for that film, a symbol of Asian culture: a place of constant traffic where no emotional connection could ever be made. Compare that to the diner setting in My Blueberry Nights, which exists in a New York City of dreams; a fantasy world where people are free to sit all night and discuss the meaning of life with nary another worry. This is a highly improbable setting. What was once poetics is now oversimplification.

Stylistics

Since Wong's earlier films operated on an allegorical level, his poetic filmmaking style contributed greatly to setting the mood of his films. Stripped of this context, in America Wong's style now feels superfluous, getting in the way of the narrative instead of helping to propel it forward.

Many critics have compared Wong's style to that of Godard, which may have provided and accurate description at one time, but where Godard employed stylistics in order to dissect and comment on style itself, Wong's stylistics now feel like an unnecessary sheen; throwing them in for no better reason than to show that he can.

My Blueberry Nights is a rambling, fragmentary, messy fairytale that ultimately fails because, lacking in cultural context, it feels like an empty execution in stylized filmmaking. The story is too vague and mindlessly episodic to touch many audiences on a deep emotional level. If Wong Kar-Wai wants to survive, he'll either have to change his approach to storytelling with the change of scenery or find a story that demands being told in such a manner. This was not it.

The copyright of the article My Blueberry Nights Misses the Mark in Drama DVD Reviews is owned by Mike Lippert. Permission to republish My Blueberry Nights Misses the Mark in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.