"I'm not sure whether that night really happened, or if it was just another dream." --the movie trailer.

Wong Kar Wai, the Hong Kong auteur, has made his first movie all in English and set in the USA. He's built it around Grammy Award singer Norah Jones, never before in a film, and still rather more a beauty than an actress--but a presence as well as a beauty. More coherent than many of Wong's efforts, this has been accused of being a "trifle"--or is it just that the plot seems silly now that it's all clear and in English? Like all Wong's work, this is a film that's romantic, sad, and gorgeous to look at from first to last and full of strong, catchy pop-blues-country music (Ry Couder did the score).

The beautiful Ms. Jones's character, variously known as Elizabeth, Lizzie, Beth, or Betty, turns up at a New York cafe run by Jeremy (Jude Law), a guy from Manchester, England, drenched in love-longing because her man has dumped her for somebody else. Jeremy has a jar full of keys from patrons, each with a story, and Lizzie gives him hers, hoping her boyfriend will pick them up again. Jeremy has his own lost love, Katya (Cat Power); she'll turn up later on just to say goodbye to him in a little vignette. Jeremy's keys also stand for doors he himself doesn't want to close.

Though Lizzie's boyfriend (a former customer) never reappears at the cafe, Jeremy and Lizzie begin to have late night chats and sugar orgies, she eating a piece of blueberry pie with ice cream--picking blueberry because that's the pie that's always left over at the end of the day.

There's a fight in the cafe, and Jeremy plays around with a surveillance camera, which he seems to use as a kind of diary. Soon he will be alone, and Lizzie will be gone. . .

Instead of improvising from scratch as in the past, which among other things contributed to his previous film, 2046, taking five years to finish, this time Wong says he made up his story in advance with Norah in mind and had it turned into a finished screenplay (subject to plenty of revisions, of course) by crime novelist Lawrence Block. This one had a low budget and took just a couple of months to make. Shooting time, that is. It really took a year to do the editing, but Wong had that finished, to everyone's surprise, just in time for My Blueberry Nights to be shown as the opener at Cannes last year--where it was not very well received.

Like Wong's other films, this one encapsulates several different stories. The second one comes when Lizzie decides to "cross the street" to revisit Jeremy by the "longest way possible," which turns out to be a trip to Memphis and Nevada and points in between, covering thousands of miles and taking nearly a year--a time of self-discovery, no doubt (though she doesn't observably change), and a pause before beginning the inevitable romance with Jeremy. Landing in Memphis Lizzie works at two jobs, saving up money to buy a car. At a bar she encounters the drama of the drunken cop Arnie Copeland (David Strathairn) and his estranged wife, Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz). Both are fine, acting their heads off in scenes heady with barroom dysfunction. For once, an on-screen drunk admits to going to Alcoholics Anonymous--and collecting a beginner's chip over and over and over. He throws the chips on the bar and they make a satisfying chink. But Arnie comes to a bad end, though Sue Lynne, despite rejecting him, keeps his tab open as she lights out for the territory. Through all of this Lizzie sends Jeremy a stream of postcards that are a kind of intimate, shared voice-over diary, and, sucked in by it, he desperately tries to track her down by phone and letter, without success.

Every young filmmaker dreams of making a road movie, Wong Kar Wai has said. Though he's now fifty, this is a kind of new beginning, or felt like one to him. But, he said, this movie isn't really a road movie; it's a vacation. And it's not about a journey, but about distance. Maybe the trip across the street for Lizzie is all a dream--one by Sam Shepherd, working with David Lynch.

Sue Lynne gives Lizzie a generous donation for being Arnie's barmaid too, and Lizzie lights out for Nevada. There she's working at a gambling dive where she meets a young woman named Leslie (Nathalie Portman, slick and sure of herself here). Leslie's a pro who knows how to win, and she and Lizzie wind up leaving town together in a flash car with a pile of loot. Eventually, Lizzie ends up back at Jeremy's cafe, and he's waiting for her.

Coming after As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, In the Mood For Love, and 2046, Wong's excursion into America, despite its surprisingly happy ending, is completely consistent and logical. Those who seem disappointed, may miss the ellipses and madcap improv of the earlier films--but may have failed to notice that they too were full of pop-novel gimmicks and romantic cuteness. Wong's sentimentality passes muster in those earlier permutations because of cryptic story lines, poetic voice-overs, hypnotic uses of music, and adventurous camera work--mostly by Christopher Doyle, here replaced by the half-French and wholly brilliant Darius Khondji --made infinitely rich by complex editing. My Blueberry Nights is full of criss-cross angles, fast overlaps, closeups so shallow atmospheric Americana may go unnoticed, till a lovely panorama flits by. Color is typically warm and dense. The effect is to make every frame an Acid-trip pleasure.

Reciting Wong Kar Wai's list of features brings home how he single-handedly made the Eighties and Nineties an exciting cinematic time, from the first days when you had to go to a theater on the edge of Chinatown, and then you watched badly subtitled Hong Kong prints found in esoteric video shops, to the time when Tarantino's Miramax label, Rolling Thunder, distributed Chungking Express in a good print with clear titles and the secret was out. More than any other director to emerge in the last two decades, Wong Kar Wai has made me still believe in film as an art form and a medium that can inspire and enchant the soul like no other.

Maybe Wong never did anything better than Days of Being Wild, the first film in which he became truly himself. But what does it matter? He is the quintessential stylist, and his work is all of a piece, though each is also quite different. My Blueberry Nights is a bit of a shock. No, the artist hasn't risen to a new level or embarked on a whole new set of themes after the glorious exhaustion of 2046. He has simply transferred those themes to a new country and a new language--a fascinating and quite successful process--working in a new way, with new collaborators, but a lot of his regulars, and no loss of the distinctive baroque style. If that isn't enough, maybe you wanted a kung fu movie. Maybe this is "just another dream." But who could have filmed it but Wong Kar Wai?

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.