Cannes diary: day one

On lost luggage and Wong Kar Wai

My first trip to Cannes was inaugurated with an auspicious case of missing baggage. I had forgotten to check my baggage out of Heathrow when transiting in London, and was left wearing the same plane-weary clothes the whole day as I fretted and worried about the eventual fate of my stuff. It was returned to me that very night in one piece, thank heavens, and so began my (mis)adventures at the world's greatest film festival, no hyperbole here.

Missing the premiere of Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights (but not missing the massive crowds that thronged the Palais for the premiere), I was confined to my apartment waiting for my baggage to arrive (in which contained the tuxedo I needed to walk the red carpet). Not that I could get tickets for it anyway. The film opened the festival with all the necessary glamor and paparazzi glitz for it's 60^th anniversary, and in many ways sums up everything about the festival. I was later lucky enough to squeeze into a market screening of the film (a nice word for it, though, judging from the petite theatrette it was screened in, it was probably more for buyers to see what they had missed buying) after all the hype and controversy over the film had become passé.

The film, like the festival, has an impenetrably beautiful sheen that is as much substance as is its raison d'être. Shot in extremely saturated colors and featuring a superstar lineup, the film feels like it was made by an overconfident hand hammering out time and again a familiar 'masterpiece' of arty wistfulness and gorgeous pop images. It is all superficial flavor-of-the-month candy cool, with absolutely nothing to fill in as substance. But far from covering it up with any form of weight, it wears its superficiality on its sleeve - style is much more important that substance, and that is perhaps the biggest epiphany one can get when attending the festival and its market. That is not to say the festival (and the film) is not all terribly fun and heady. After all, prettily packaged glossiness always has its appeal to everyone whether they care to admit it or not.

But back to the film. You know that even Wong Kar Wai is unsure of himself when he pours out every trick that he's used so far in this film (it even has a harmonica reprise of the iconic Shigeru Umebayashi theme used in In the Mood for Love!). There is only so much one can take of slo-mos, shutter effects, smudgy-eyed loneliness, characters sitting in cafes, awfully pretentious dialog and world-weary gazes. And in My Blueberry Nights, every frame is hyper-WKW. Wong Kar Wai has always tread precariously on the line of pretentiousness and sublimity; some of his films work (Happy Together, In the Mood for Love) and some don't (most of Ashes of Time). Even those that work sometimes waver between pretentiousness and genuine soul; he is always confident that pretty images, music, and well-placed words (in the form of intertitles or dialog) can evoke a sense of connection, even to ludicrous characters and premises. When he hits the right spot, his cinema is breathtaking; but when his style goes wrong, it is always horrible, horrible, horrible. Case in point, everybody who makes a film these days wants to make a Wong Kar Wai film, but almost every one of them turn out repulsively poseur. Which always leads me to think that there is something more to Wong Kar Wai's films than pretty images, music, and words.

But I'll be damned if I knew what it is. Sometimes I think it's heart (a too-muddled and rubbish term [alongside the term 'emotion'] for something that feels true), sometimes I think it's his fantastic way with actors. But both of these aspects are markedly absent in My Blueberry Nights. Its vacuous core is hardly helped by shrill and wincing performances by the usually solid Rachel Weisz and David Strathairn (though Norah Jones is, surprisingly, extremely okay). Maybe something gets lost in translation with his switch to working with Western actors, because with all the pretty images, music, and words, the film feels very much like a Wong Kar Wai-wannabe making a Wong Kar Wai film.