Dessert Love

Depending on whether you are focused on music or of movies, you may be anticipating My Blueberry Nights, which opened the Cannes Film Festival almost exactly one year ago, as the acting debut of signer Norah Jones, or as the new film from Wong Kar Wai, whose films like In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express have kept the notion of arthouse cinema alive in an era when it usually means little more than “films that audiences will watch even though they have subtitles.”

Me, I look at it as the screenwriting debut of Lawrence Block, esteemed mystery novelist, writing teacher, and native of Buffalo, even though he’s lived in Manhattan for so long that the New York Times once ranked him #13 on a list of the 100 Coolest People in New York. (That’s ahead of Richard Price, Max Weinberg, Lou Reed, and Tito Puente.) Wong invited him to write the screenplay based on his original story idea, a collaboration you can read more about here next week in an interview with Block.

In all honesty, though, you don’t go to a Wong Kar Wai film for the story. Working prior to this film in Hong Kong, Wong has been the master of a distinctive kind of intoxicated urban romanticism, with brooding characters whose longing breaks out of the confined paces where he shoots them, yet seldom out of their hearts.

Wong had his biggest international hit in 2000 with In the Mood for Love. Armed with the double-edged clout of an auteur who has just made money, he spent the next few years indulging himself on 2046, a gorgeous hallucination that expanded on characters and themes from In the Mood but overwhelmed all but his most ardent fans. (And I’m not sure that even they necessarily understood it.)

Norah Jones and Natalie Portman in My Blueberry Nights

My Blueberry Nights, his first film made in the United States, is a return to the themes and style of Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, the freewheeling films that first won him international attention. That may come as a disappointment to fans who wanted him to keep following his muse off the cliff of comprehension. For those of us willing to settle for 90 minutes of lusciously neon-lit longing, though, it’s as pleasurable as that dessert you know you shouldn’t have after a meal you already paid too much for.

The movie opens (and, you will not be surprised to learn, ends) in a small but busy Manhattan restaurant run by Jeremy (Jude Law). Fans of Chungking Express are thus immediately on familiar territory, and will understand that Wong’s casting of a female singer in his leading role is par for course.

Norah Jones is Elizabeth, who comes here looking for her boyfriend. The information Jeremy provides her once she tells him what her guy likes to eat leads to a breakup scene of endearing terseness, conducted over a cel phone: “Are you seeing someone else?…Who is she?…I hope you both drop dead!”

Being the kind of entrepreneur who always has time for customers, Jeremy becomes Elizabeth’s sounding board, and she takes to coming there every night at closing time to help him finish off the day’s leftover desserts. She’s also hoping her ex will come back for his keys, Jeremy being a repository of such for the ’hood.

But one night she doesn’t quite make it across the street for her regular appointment. Instead, she hits the road, dropping the disappointed Jeremy the occasional postcard from her travels.

These include a stint in Memphis, where she takes a job as a bartender that makes her privy to the heartbreak of a cop (David Strathairn) and his cheating wife (Rachel Weisz), and another in Reno, where she befriends a poker hustler (Natalie Portman) who fails to persuade her that she should learn never to trust people. Jeremy, in the meantime, has a brief isit form the woman who broke his heart, which gives Wong a chance to photograph another singer, in this case Chan (Cat Power) Marshall.

If Manhattan, Memphis and Reno have anything in common, it’s that they look their best when you don’t look at them too directly but wait until night when the neon softens the ugliness. You can’t take any of these very seriously, and I don’t see why you would want to. It looks lovely, sounds terrific (the Ry Cooder-produced score includes songs by Jones and Power, along with Otis Redding, Mavis Staples, and Cassandra Wilson). I wouldn’t want to live a love story like this. But I love to watch one.