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Wong Kar Wai is one of my favourite film makers, Top 5, one of the best of all time. This is his first English language movie, the rest have been in Chinese and almost exclusively set in Hong Kong. So this movie is quite the change, it's not only in English, it's set in America, mostly in New York. It's a rare film maker who can translate his sensibilities into not only a different language but a completely different culture as well. WKW manages this transition almost perfectly, despite a couple of missteps.
The themes of the movie are familiar, not just to viewers of his previous movies. It's all about love, loss and yearning. Jude Law plays a cafe owner in New York, Jeremy, who encounters Norah Jones' character, Elizabeth, the night she breaks up with her boyfriend. Their romance doesn't exactly bloom, it's a slow burn, one with a complex flavour and after-taste. I'm using food metaphors here, the movie takes it's title from Blueberry pie after all. There's great chemistry between the leads. Norah Jones is competent for the most part and Jude Law is very good. He's the heart of the movie, despite most of it being centered around the character of Elizabeth.
Elizabeth takes off to explore a world different from her current one, without letting Jeremy know. She keeps in touch by sending him a stream of postcards. The two sub-plots are set in Memphis and Las Vegas/Nevada. The Memphis story is weak and Rachel Weisz is terribly miscast. I almost lost hope for the movie there. The Vegas/Nevada story is set around a gambler, played by Natalie Portman, who has a tortured relationship with her dying father. Natalie Portman is completely convincing, even if Norah Jones is on slightly shaky ground in some scenes. After we're done with Elizabeth's journey, the story returns back to New York for it's conclusion.
The trouble with this movie (apart from the clunker in Memphis) is that everything feels like it's been covered in a WKW movie before, most significantly in 'Chungking Express'. It's not one of his masterworks that I've become used to expecting from him. Still, it's a satisfying movie and nobody, and I mean nobody, can do romance better than WKW, even if it's a little re-cycled.
9/10
