I just hope he isn't selling out to Hollywood.
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.
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 Mr. Wong’s earlier work that it felt like a midcareer retrospective unto
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