My Blueberry Nights - Movie Review
Anyone who has been to Las Vegas, Memphis or New York — or who has received postcards from friends in those cities — is likely to find “My Blueberry Nights,” Wong Kar-wai’s first English-language feature, wildly unrealistic, even though much of it was shot on location in the real-deal U.S.A. The smoky Tennessee juke joint and the cute little Manhattan bakery-cafe look like theme restaurants catering to the tourist trade, and even the highways snaking through the mountains and deserts have the inauthentic glow of rental-car advertisements. Mr. Wong and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, make America look so pretty that you may have trouble recognizing it.
But to complain about the evident artificiality of Mr. Wong’s variation on the Great American Road Movie, which has shed around 20 minutes since opening the Cannes Film Festival in May, is to risk missing the point. Not only because in post-Hollywood America, as every self-respecting French philosopher knows, the simulacrum has eclipsed the thing itself. But also because Mr. Wong, whose previous films have occasionally strayed as far from his beloved Hong Kong as Cambodia and South America, has never been especially concerned with verisimilitude. You suspect that he would hire a production designer for his summer vacation slide show. Indeed, that’s pretty much what he has done in “My Blueberry Nights” (the production designer is William Chang Suk Ping). He’s also brought along a few movie stars (Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law) to make the scenery even more picturesque. Source: NYTimes
