The Face Knife

(this is suddenly timely again, given the film’s release on DVD/onDemand. So I am plopping it here even though the Face Knife is still not 100%. For more ephemeral stuff, visit How’s Yr Face? until stuff gets reorganized here.)

Wong Kar-Wai’s first English language film is an epic, in the sense that the scope of the bad decisions made regarding story, dialogue, shot choice, editing, casting, and music cues place it in a class by itself among films made by highly regarded, established auteurs. It is an utterly terrible movie and therefore I enjoyed myself thoroughly, and I wish to see it again, immediately. It’s not often that you can enjoy such an extreme collection of miscalculations by one of the most respected filmmakers in the world, and as such the film deserves to be treasured and studied for all time.

Ostensibly a film about lost souls and the geographic and emotional distances between them, My Blueberry Nights is also a road movie - if one were to take a standard road movie and:
(a) elide 90% of the actual travel
(b) pare down the usual number of Significant Encounters With Strangers to about three; and
(c) feature a main character whose capacity for introspection is stymied by an intellect capable of being confused by the difference between meatloaf and pork chops.

Played by famous musician Norah Jones in her first acting job, Elizabeth is an ultra-naif who makes the aimless Scarlett Johansson character in Lost in Translation look like Hillary Clinton in comparison. Don’t get me wrong - I have nothing against ultra-naifs, but they also need to be cutely retarded (cf Chungking Express, Amelie, most of the career of Samantha Morton) in order to sustain interest in their antics. We don’t really get a whole lot of quirky shenanigans in this film, and while that might seem to be a good thing in light of the recent overwhelmingly “twee” trend that has threatened to engulf cinema like a comfy, woolen tidal wave made during someone’s L Train knitting sessions, shenanigans would have been preferable to watching a total blank slate try and fail to come up with an identity for herself over 90 minutes (and however many miles/days the intertitles claimed for this beige night of the soul).

The story (as such) is set in motion when handsome and totally unbelievable restaurateur Jeremy (Jude Law) inadvertently reveals to Jones, via his charming ability to remember customers by their food orders, that her boyfriend is cheating on her. She freaks out and repeatedly visits the restaurant in order to semi-stalk her ex, an opportunity Law siezes to ply her with free pies and free metaphors about pies (as well as keys and other really obvious bullshit - god help them, they live in a world where people communicate solely through bad short story level symbolism - it makes the “dropping Dad’s luggage” scene in The Darjeeling Limited look fresh by comparison). The turning point of their would-be meet-cute romance occurs when both characters simultaneously acquire bloody noses from separate acts of random violence and Jones devours an entire Roofieberry Pie, which causes her to fall unconscious, thus allowing Law to lick ice cream remnants from her face.

Waking up with no memory of her formerly a la mode face and how it came to be cream-free, Jones decides to run away from her life by heading on a bus to Memphis. Her Hero’s Journey from depressed ultra-naif to not-depressed ultra-naif is symbolized by the adoption of various versions of her first name (Lizzy, Betty, Beth, Zabby, E-Liz, etc.) during her stint as a cross-country waitress. Unfortunately, she doesn’t seem to acquire a personality in the process. For someone who spends a year on the road waitressing she surprisingly only meets three totally fucked up characters who might Change Her Life: Alcoholic cop David Strathairn, his ex-wife Rachel Weisz (I think we are supposed to assume she is somewhat crazy because she left him) in Memphis, and conniving Texas Hold’em master Natalie Portman somewhere in Nevada. Jones is apparently waitressing to save up money for a car, which sort of doesn’t make any sense because she seems to be pretty mobile via bus, and the first thing she does after buying the car is drive straight back to New York City.

During Jones’s titanic journey, an inexplicably haunted Law tries to track her down, first by calling every bar and grill in Memphis (his efforts are stymied because, duh, she changes her name) and then by sending the exact same handwritten postcard to every bar and grill in Memphis. His year-long obsessive compulsive creepiness is interrupted only by his Russian ex-girlfriend Katya (Cat Power), who is responsible for one of the worst line-readings in cinematic history (though thankfully no one saw fit to ask her to attempt an accent), although it results in you know, an epiphany, about like keys and doors and people or something.

I actually have a lot of sympathy for the actors, because they were really given nothing to work with. Every character has a backstory that only exists in barely-there exposition, and I don’t think there’s a way to convincingly speak the alternately on-the-nose and corny dialogue. The extreme lack of action taking place in the present wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the characters were sharply drawn, but instead of conveying emotions through a precise choice of words WKW grafts some incredibly overused stylistic devices onto the scenes in order to convey those inner depths. Half of the movies is shot through obscuring glass windows and the like, making it look like photographer Lee Friedlander was lobotomized in the late 90s and forced to shoot a Molson Ice commercial. And Wong Kar-Wai apparently believes not only that every single internal emotion a person feels can be cinematically expressed through the use of slow-motion but that every single internal emotion a person feels MUST be cinematically expressed through the use of slow-motion, a tendency that reaches its apotheosis in a useless slow-motion sequence of Jones eating a sandwich while she ruminates on a business proposition put to her by Portman. It is almost a parody of his style, like a first year film school student roped in a bunch of his prettiest friends and decided to make a Wong Kar-Wai movie.

Those aren’t even the goofiest conceits in the movie. The film begins with a montage of close-up, molten piescapes that seethe with hidden emotions and also berries. While mouthwatering, these are exceedingly silly, especially when a dollop of melty ice cream is added to drip suggestively off the lip of the plate (and that’s as sexy as this incredibly chaste film gets). There are recurrent inserts of the piescapes throughout the film, which never failed to make me giggle. Repetition is also a feature of the soundtrack, as bits and pieces of source music are repeated throughout the film, tied to a specific locale and/or character pair. When the scenes between Law and Jones at the beginning of the film were scored to “The Greatest” by Cat Power, one after the other with no intervening music, my hopes were briefly raised that EVERY SINGLE scene in the film would be set to that song, (kind of like that Andy Samberg SNL parody of the OC/Imogen Heap) but it was not to be.

Look, do yourself a favor, get together with your most smart-alecky friends and go see this movie in the theater before it deservedly disappears. Ninety minutes of enjoyment can be had by simply exchanging incredulous looks as each bit of dialogue happens, and if you’re a tiny, tiny person (like me) maybe you’ll feel a little bit of satisfaction that even a creditable genius can crash and burn spectacularly.