CANNES, France, May 17 — As a first course the 60th Cannes Film Festival served its audiences dessert.

Wong Kar-wai, the Hong Kong director who was president of the jury at the 2006 festival, opened this year’s event with “My Blueberry Nights,” a romantic confection that begins with a lingering shot of vanilla ice cream melting into the gooey filling of a blueberry pie.



http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765120/

The film, Mr. Wong’s first English-language feature, takes place in a postcard America of diners and red neon signs, a land of heartbreak and second chances where folks play poker and drink whiskey and subsist on cheeseburgers, pork chops and, in at least one case, quite a bit of that pie.

The pie eater is Norah Jones, the singer and songwriter, who makes her screen debut as Elizabeth, a New Yorker on the rebound from a long relationship with an unfaithful, unseen and unnamed boyfriend. She takes refuge in a homey restaurant managed by Jeremy (Jude Law), where there is always a lot of blueberry pie left over at closing time.

After they strike up a late-night, pastry-fueled friendship, sealed with a lovely, drowsy screen kiss, Elizabeth takes off on a journey that leads her from Memphis to Nevada, through a series of waitress jobs, slightly altered identities (she’s Lizzie in one place, Beth in another) and encounters with other lonely souls. These include an alcoholic policeman (David Strathairn), his estranged wife (Rachel Weisz) and a gambler (Natalie Portman) who seems to talk a better game than she plays.

Over the years Mr. Wong has acquired a passionate following — one that occasionally manifests cultlike tendencies — for his sensual visual style and oblique narratives of erotic longing. “My Blueberry Nights” may strike his devotees, and skeptics as well, as both a notable departure and a variation on his characteristic themes. He is still interested in the mysterious nature of desire and the effects of time and distance upon it. But the setting, the language and the conventions of English-language screen acting give this movie, for better or worse, a decided air of novelty.

Mr. Wong’s other recent films, like “In the Mood For Love” and “2046” (both shown at previous festivals here) unfold mainly in the narrow hallways and cramped rooms of hotels and apartment buildings in crowded Asian cities, where the men dress in dark suits and the women wear flower-printed cheongsams.

Those movies are dense with color and shadow. In “My Blueberry Nights,” shot in CinemaScope by Darius Khondji, the colors are still rich and smoky, but the wider format gives the compositions a looser, more open feeling. And the characters, contemporary Americans (and one British expatriate), are correspondingly relaxed, even in their moments of distress. Whereas their Asian counterparts in other Wong Kar-wai movies — Gong Li, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung — show emotion through masks of mystery and reserve, Ms. Jones and her co-stars invite and promise easy empathy.

Whether they entirely earn it is another question, one likely to be batted around as “My Blueberry Nights” continues on its journey to screens around the world. (It will be released in the United States by the Weinstein Company.)

Eva Herzigova:



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