On a SoHo film set last August, Jude Law and Norah Jones were
getting intimate. Repeatedly intimate. To be precise, they had
kissed upwards of 150 times in the past three days.
The occasion for this outbreak of passion was My Blueberry
Nights, the first English-language film by Wong Kar-wai, the
maverick Hong Kong director turned avatar of cosmopolitan cool.
This particular night was stifling as the crew spilled out of
Palacinka, a small cafe on Grand Street that was the principal New
York location, preparing for yet another take of the scene known as
"the Kiss."
It's closing time, and Ms. Jones, the only remaining customer,
is slumped on the counter, her eyes shut. A smudge of cream rests
on her upper lip, the telltale sign of a dessert binge. Mr. Law,
cleaning up behind the bar, gazes at her, slowly leans in and
steals a lingering kiss. When he surfaces, the cream on her lip is
gone.
The shot lasted less than a minute, but the number of
permutations that Mr. Wong and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji,
devised — 15 set-ups, by the count of the script supervisor —
suggested it would play a central role in the finished film. The
Kiss was being shot at different film speeds and from a multitude
of angles: a wide shot, his point of view, hers, through windows,
with objects in the foreground.
"I've never worked with someone who's put so much emphasis on a
single moment," Mr. Law said between takes one night. "It's
extraordinary how he'll take a moment and replay it and slice it
up."
The consecration of a fleeting, fugitive moment is one of Mr.
Wong's specialties. Perhaps more than any filmmaker since Alain
Resnais, his great subject is time — or more specifically lost
time. His rhapsodic movies, haunted by voice-over ruminations and
swathed in lush regret, seem to transpire in the realm of memory.
People and places are mourned even as they are captured on camera.
Mr. Wong, 48, is keen to describe My Blueberry Nights,
a road movie shot in New York, Memphis, Las Vegas and Ely, Nev.,
with a cast that also includes Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz and
David Strathairn, as a new beginning. His last film, 2046,
was planned as science fiction but demonstrated the gravitational
pull of the past as well, succumbing to the hothouse delirium of
1960s Hong Kong. A kaleidoscopic head rush, 2046 quoted so
extensively from Wong's earlier work that it felt like a midcareer
retrospective unto itself.
To a notorious degree Mr. Wong finds his way as he goes, often
plunging into production with little more than an outline. His
exploratory method gives his films a unique shape and intensity;
the result is inseparable from the process.
In the mid-1990s, with Hong Kong's reversion to Chinese
sovereignty looming, Mr. Wong directed three films — Chungking
Express, Fallen Angels and Happy Together —
in quick succession. Made as if on deadline, they have a brash
Polaroid-like immediacy. The films that followed, In the Mood
for Love and 2046, are period reveries rooted in the
melancholy of transience. It's only fitting that he had a hard time
letting go; each took a seeming eternity to complete. "In five
years you can make five films, but I spent five years making one,"
he said in his Manhattan hotel room soon after the shoot, referring
to 2046.
My Blueberry Nights — repeat kisses notwithstanding —
is a conscious attempt to pick up the pace. For one thing, Mr. Wong
shot it in just seven weeks. "We thought of this as a vacation
film, spontaneous and contemporary," he said. "Making a film under
the best conditions, it's like a rock band on tour," he added, ever
the rock-star director: his trademark sunglasses stayed on through
the New York night shoots.
For another, Mr. Wong said that the project "happened
overnight." He was in New York last year researching another movie,
The Lady From Shanghai, a period drama (no relation to the
Orson Welles film noir) that would star Nicole Kidman and shoot in
Russia, Shanghai and New York. When that was postponed, he decided
to make a smaller, off-the-cuff film, which he conceived as a
vehicle for Ms. Jones, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, who
had never acted before.
"She's a natural," he said, adding that he had instructed her
not to take acting lessons.
As he sees it, My Blueberry Nights is in a sense about
Ms. Jones's face as it reacts to different environments. "In
Memphis there's something very classic about her presence," he
said. "In New York it's very contemporary."
Ms. Jones seemed less confident than her director. "I have no
idea what he saw in me or where he saw it," she said on a coffee
break one night. "When I got the call, I thought he wanted some
music for his movies. It's weird because I feel like I've looked
uncomfortable in every music video I've been in."
William Chang, who has been Mr. Wong's editor, production
designer and costume designer from the start, is with him on My
Blueberry Nights, but for the first time in 15 years
Christopher Doyle, the iconoclastic Australian cinematographer, is
not. Together Mr. Wong and Mr. Doyle invented a much copied visual
shorthand for romantic alienation, a mix of neon-smudged kinesis
and slow-motion contemplation. But their relationship has been
strained of late, with Mr. Doyle's Hollywood workload and Mr.
Wong's erratic schedules becoming incompatible. In Mr. Doyle's
place is Mr. Khondji, the French cinematographer best known for the
dank atmospherics of David Fincher's Se7en.
Just as striking as Mr. Doyle's absence from the project is the
presence of Hollywood actors. Over the years Mr. Wong has built up
a repertory of Hong Kong luminaries who learned to thrive under his
impulsive demands. My Blueberry Nights subjects its starry
ensemble to an open-ended process that would be inconceivable on a
studio movie. (The film was acquired for American distribution by
the Weinstein Company earlier this month.)
Mr. Wong was also working for the first time with a
screenwriting partner, the crime novelist Lawrence Block, who had
written some scenes based on an outline. While shooting, Mr. Wong
constantly revised and added new scenes, often at the last
minute.
He said he was surprised to find that the actors were not only
ready for the challenge — his reputation preceded him — but even
excited.
Mr. Wong was also working for the first time with a
screenwriting partner, the crime novelist Lawrence Block, who had
written some scenes based on an outline. While shooting, Mr. Wong
constantly revised and added new scenes, often at the last minute.
He said he was surprised to find that the actors were not only
ready for the challenge — his reputation preceded him — but even
excited.
(New York Times via CRI by Dennis Lim November 21,
2006)
