For his
English-language debut My Blueberry Nights,
Wong Kar-wai didn't have to churn out a B-movie for a
Hollywood studio. Instead, he called his own shots, working
with his own production company to make a movie about
an American road trip that drew some big stars: Jude
Law, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz.
The Hong Kong
director even persuaded Grammy-winning singer Norah Jones
to make her movie debut. Wong's stellar reputation in the
West, despite spending most of his career making moody
Chinese-language art-house movies, is testimony to his
visual flair and his painstaking approach to
filmmaking.
Quentin Tarantino
is credited with having been a major booster; his
distribution company, Rolling Thunder, released Wong's
Chungking Express in the United States in
1996. Some, however, are baffled by Wong's popularity among
Western critics and filmmakers.
Critics have
followed Wong's work since the late 1980s. His movie As
Tears Go By screened out of competition at the
Cannes Film Festival in 1989. In a report about the Hong
Kong Film Festival in 1991, film critic Tony Rayns
praised Wong's film released that year, Days of
Being Wild, in Sight and Sound magazine,
calling it a ''gorgeous evocation of Hong Kong in
1960.''
In a later
review, Rayns called the film, about a Hong Kong playboy,
''a tour de force of nonlinear narrative,
atmospherics, poetic rhythms, and visual writing.''
Then came Chungking Express, which the
Village Voice gave a rave, calling it ''a
lyrical marvel, a Jules and Jim for our
anonymous time,'' referring to the classic 1962 Francois
Truffaut love story. Chungking Express was also
the first of Wong's movies that Weisz, who appears in
My Blueberry Nights, saw, the actress told
the Associated Press. Weisz said it was ''very
romantic and passionate and visually unlike anything
else.''
After
Chungking Express, U.S. distributors picked
up Fallen Angels and Happy Together, the gay
romance that won Wong best director at Cannes in 1997.
By 2001, Wong had already established a solid American
following. His romance In the Mood for Love was
shown in 74 theaters and made a respectable $2.7
million, according to the box-office-tracking Web site Box
Office Mojo.
In Europe, Cannes
continued to beckon. Four of Wong's movies have
competed for the top Golden Palm prize, including Happy
Together, In the Mood for Love, his 2004 movie
2046, and this year's My Blueberry Nights,
which is scheduled to be released in the United
States and Europe in November. Stephen Teo, who
wrote a book on Wong, said the director ''really nurtures a
character. He really directs an actor to the best of his
ability.... Wong Kar-wai gives actors that kind of
range, that kind of opportunity to fully express
themselves with their expressions, their gestures,'' Teo
said.
Teo added that
Wong is unique in that he's an Asian producing sensual
imagery with nostalgic soundtracks from the 1960s--the
type of art-house fare that moviegoers expect from
European filmmakers. Portman, who appears in My
Blueberry Nights, told the AP she's impressed
with Wong's ''all-encompassing ability to convey very
specific feeling through music, lighting, pacing, and, of
course, actor direction.''
She called
Happy Together ''one of the greatest films
about love ever made.'' Others, however, say Wong is
overrated and has carefully built up his image. Michael
Berry, author of Speaking in Images: Interviews
With Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers, said
Wong cultivates an aura of mystery by rarely granting
interviews and wearing his trademark sunglasses.
Patrick Tam, an
acclaimed Hong Kong director who edited Days of Being
Wild, said in an interview in the book Wong
Kar-wai's Movie World that he thinks Wong has
been on the decline. He called In the Mood for
Love, about the romance between a man and a woman whose
spouses are having an affair, ''showy.''
''You're very
conscious of the art direction, the packaging, the music,
the slow motion...but the relationship between the two
characters didn't touch me,'' Tam said. Tam told the
AP he didn't understand why Wong's work was so popular
in the West. ''I think it is fair to say that fashion
or popularity are unexplainable and very often have nothing
to do with the true quality of a piece of work,'' he
said. (Min Lee, AP)