The Master of Time: Wong Kar-wai in America - 王家衛

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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/movies/19lim.html?ref=movies

November 19, 2006
The Master of Time: Wong Kar-wai in America
By DENNIS LIM

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.”
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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 itself.

To a notorious degree Mr. Wong finds his way as he goes, often plunging into
production with little more than an outline. His exploratory method gives his
films a unique shape and intensity; the result is inseparable from the
process.

In the mid-1990s, with Hong Kong’s reversion to Chinese sovereignty looming,
Mr. Wong directed three films — “Chungking Express,” “Fallen Angels” and
“Happy Together” — in quick succession. Made as if on deadline, they have
a brash Polaroid-like immediacy. The films that followed, “In the Mood for
Love” and “2046,” are period reveries rooted in the melancholy of
transience. It’s only fitting that he had a hard time letting go; each took
a seeming eternity to complete. “In five years you can make five films, but
I spent five years making one,” he said in his Manhattan hotel room soon
after the shoot, referring to “2046.”

“My Blueberry Nights” — repeat kisses notwithstanding — is a conscious
attempt to pick up the pace. For one thing, Mr. Wong shot it in just seven
weeks. “We thought of this as a vacation film, spontaneous and contemporary,
” he said. “Making a film under the best conditions, it’s like a rock band
on tour,” he added, ever the rock-star director: his trademark sunglasses
stayed on through the New York night shoots.
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