Don't hate me because I'm in Cannes.

Really. There's nothing to envy me for. Here, I'll prove it.

For one thing, the weather and the views are nothing to write home about.

My hotel is kind of a dive.

Wait, I've got more complaints...

As you might have inferred, I was kidding just now. Really, despite a little tiredness, la vita really is pretty dolce out here on the Cote d'Azur. But it ain't all placid seas and elegance, as a walk past the Palais after taking in a screening of Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights testified. Here's the crunch outside of "Les Marches," which is Cannes for "red carpet," for the fancy premiere, as opposed to press, screening of Nights.

That's right. It's a madhouse! A madhouse! The festival offers a fairly meta solution to the problem of not being able to see anything going on—they've installed giant video screens along the Croisette with a live feed of the proceedings. Here we see a throng gazing at a video screen image of Nights costar Jude Law. The flesh-and-blood Law was maybe 70 yards to the right at the moment I snapped this...

"But never mind that, Glenn," I can hear a lot of you saying. (I've really got to talk to someone about the voices I keep hearing, don't I?) "You just saw My Blueberry Nights, Kar-Wai's eagerly anticipated English-language movie debut?" How was it?" Well, I have a few thoughts.

It's alternatingly ravishing and awkward. It resembles Chungking Express more than any Kar-Wai film since then has. If you expected singer Norah Jones to come on all mellow-to-the-point-of-ethereal like her music, you figured wrong; her character (and her performance) is kind of raw and anxious and can be a bit irritating, and I believe that's on purpose. The various voiceover ruminations from characters, with reflections of keys and opening doors and a lot of other metaphor-kinda-stuff, is banal enough to lead to a frightening thought—the would-be profoundities of Kar-Wai's characters in his Chinese-language films were likely just as problematic; did we swallow them then because we were reading them instead of hearing them in our own language? I've gotta let the movie seep in a little more before I say anything else about it. Can I hedge and say I was disappointed but that I also wouldn't half-mind sitting through it again?

Comments

[ed]

yes, the "would-be profoundities" don't sound that swell in chinese either, but it's the sparkling personae and luscious star mystique that give them something extra. just like garbo making a world out of something as banal as "i want to be alone." the voice-over ramblings have to be taken in context of the concerto of images, sound, things left unsaid about character relationships etc. it sounds like MBN just didn't have all the waiter etiquettes, chef's little touches to bring that off.

[mike]

I've heard similar comments from others, and I can't help but chuckle to myself. If it is true that certain critics were only swallowing WKW's writing because it was a different language, then that's rather sad (and doesn't explain his success with critics who do speak his language. He's quite a hit in Hong Kong critics circles). It would certainly indicate intellectual laziness.

It's been apparent from the beginning tht Wong has a penchant for melodramatic dialogue. I think people were more accepting of it in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels because of the distinctly humorous tone of the films. The over-the-top dialogue fits in perfectly with cans of pineapple.

However, even his more "serious" works have featured melodramatic, idiosyncratic dialogue. And I truly think that it works. In fact, it might even be necessary. Wong has NEVER attempted to create a naturalistic or realistic atmosphere in his films. His films are pulled from human memory, where we tend to dramatize events, or idealize them. It's how nostalgia works (and nostalgia is the language of WKW). The profundity, as ed asserts, comes from his masterful pairings of his impeccable aural and visual elements, the dialogue is simply an atmospheric accoutrement. Melodramatic? Yes. But wholly appropriate given his mood pieces.