New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
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A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
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Restaurants
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Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
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London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Wong Kar Wai.
Cast: Norah Jones, Jude Law, David Strathairn, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz
Description: When her boyfriend of two years throws in the towel on their relationship, Elizabeth seeks comfort in a slice of blueberry pie served at the cafe run by kind-hearted Brit abroad, Jeremy. The connection between the two strangers is immediate, but it is not strong enough to stop Elizabeth embarking on a journey of self-discovery, maintaining contact with Jeremy via a series of postcards. On her travels, Elizabeth meets an emotionally devastated cop and a sexy poker player, who give her pause for romantic thought.
Country: HONG KONG/CHI/FR. 2006. 95mins
Of all the bars: Jude Law and Norah Jones, making her movie debut
Elegant: The film looks good in a swishy sort of way
Wong Kar Wai is a remarkable director who has established himself far beyond the confines of Hong Kong with films such as the passionately romantic In the Mood for Love. He has now been persuaded to make his first English-language film. But, alas, it ought to be called In the Mood for Clichés.
It is so off-kilter, in fact, that it almost persuades us that his previous work has been overvalued by those who love the exoticism in strange foreign climes.
He is still a highly distinctive film-maker - but here he is defeated by attempting to produce an American road movie with the same qualities as those in his home territory and language.
My Blueberry Nights marks the acting debut of singer Norah Jones, who does fluently enough in the lead to get other, more substantial parts in the future.
She plays Elizabeth who, jilted by her New York lover, complains of a broken heart and sets out across America to California and Las Vegas, doing odd jobs on the way and viewing the varying scene with amazement.
She first meets Jeremy (Jude Law), the British owner of a Manhattan café where blueberry pies are on the menu, then a rabid gambler (Natalie Portman), and a slightly bedraggled Memphis belle (Rachel Weisz). The road to California, she finds, is paved with troubled psyches rather than gold.
Nobody acts badly, and the film looks very good in a swishy sort of way. But the screenplay doesn't communicate any real depth of feeling and Wong Kar Wai has to resort to taking elegant pictures of the kind of Americana that we have seen oceans of times before.
The bars, the cars, the truckstops and the diners are beautifully captured in shimmering colour. But they are essentially a romanticised view of America, reverberating in the imagination of the film-maker. This means that Elizabeth's eventual epiphany seems cursory as well.
Even the blueberry pies that Jude Law plies her with, perhaps hoping for a finger-licking relationship, seem like an approximation of the real thing. But the passages between the two at least have some sort of resonance, if only ephemeral.
What we miss is precisely what the director and his actors Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung gave us as In the Mood for Love unfolded. That was a real sense of time and place and of repression fighting against sensuality.
This is more a paean to America than to its leading characters. They seem to exist in an emotional vacuum. The film is romantic, but to no discernibly thought-provoking purpose.
There's a moment when Weisz, a genuinely challenging performer even here, walks into Law's bar to the strains of Try a Little Tenderness. It's in hopelessly gooey slow motion and seems to encapsulate everything that doesn't work in a film fashioned to seduce the eye, if not the ear and the mind.
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