REVIEW BY MICK LASALLE, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

"Two important things are going on with Wong Kar-wai, the writer-director of MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS. The first is that his sensibility is wildly romantic - not unrealistic, not maudlin, not pie-in-the-sky, but full of feeling and always valuing human emotion and interaction above anything else. The second is that he's committed to replicating, in visual terms, what it's like to feel passion. So his emotions are huge, but his compulsion to re-create that consciousness is clinical, controlled and incisive. This combination of heat and intellectual distance is Wong Kar-wai in a nutshell. Unlike most American directors, he has not gotten over the human face. There's a scene in which Norah Jones, as a heartsick young woman, is sleeping with her head on a counter, and Jude Law, who runs the local diner, is looking at her. It's the moment he's falling in love, and Wong just leaves the camera on Jones' face, until we, too, start to marvel at it. Notice I say 'it,' not 'her.' With Wong, you can never forget that you're looking at a face, that is, at flesh and blood, at something temporal. Thus, Wong invites you to fall in love, not with a particular woman, but with love itself and with a specific moment in time. Few directors regularly exploit so well film's capacity for capturing the present and the past in the same instant. Wong is plugged into a special zone that feels that joy of experience and the pain of recollection simultaneously. In MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS, we observe with an extra-special intensity because we're observing through the eyes of an outsider. After an early interlude set in New York - where the weather, for some reason, is always cold - the movie becomes the story of Elizabeth (Norah Jones) and her travels. Trying to heal a broken heart and get on with her life, she goes to several small towns and takes waitressing and barmaid jobs. Wherever she goes, she meets people whose confusion and turmoil are even bigger than her own. "Singer Norah Jones, in her acting debut, brings an essential probity to the role of a woman coming into her first real understanding of pain. First she experiences the pain herself, and then she sees it in others, sort of the way it sometimes happens that you'll first hear about something and then suddenly notice it's everywhere and always has been. The spectacle of an alcoholic cop (David Straitharn) still helplessly in love with his estranged wife (Rachel Weisz) stuns her into self-reflection. So does the demeanor of a strangely buoyant gambler (Natalie Portman), who swallows her grief and lives from thrill to thrill in Las Vegas.The movie's overall story is modest, and if it were any longer the film might start to drag. But at 90 minutes, it's short enough to be carried along on the drama of its individual scenes and the strength of its performances. At one point, Wong subjects Weisz to the vicious scrutiny of an extended, emotional monologue in one unbroken close-up. It's the best acting she has ever done. And as for Portman, this is the movie that crystallizes an impression that she is turning into one of our most impish, fun-to-watch actresses. There's a range here that Hollywood has barely started exploring. "The nice thing about Wong is that, like a good gambler, he knows when to bet the farm and when to hold back. Most of the time, he plays it straight, and other times he will speed up the action into a kind of blur, to indicate time passing; or he'll fade out and back into the same shot, as though to indicate renewed focus.Everything he does re-creates a state of mind. It's such a relief to realize he's doing everything for a reason and not to show off."

Official My Blueberry Nights Website