Welcome to Gay New 2004. It follows Gay Old 2003, when sodomy became legal in all 50 states, gay marriage or “civil unions” became a possibility in three, and the media pulled a muscle patting itself on the back for accepting a fistful of swish television characters. Now, for the first time in as long as most of us can remember, a sweeping gay romance is about to get the imprimatur of mainstream — or at least prestigious — Hollywood stamped all over it. (“Making Love,” from 1982, with Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean? Anyone?)

The casting call is out for “Brokeback Mountain,” the Ang Lee-directed adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story, replete with sunsets, horses, howling windstorms and a heartbreaking love story between two young cowboys. Although the casting isn’t yet official, Hollywood sources say that heartthrobs Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger are in negotiations to star.

Should the contracts not get signed, though, there will be no shortage of well-groomed actors with representation who could be candidates to don the Stetsons and chaps. In the months since Lee announced that he would direct the movie, fans have taken to Internet chat rooms with a vengeance, begging the unhearing movie gods to cast everyone from Viggo Mortensen and Brad Pitt, or Jude Law and Benicio Del Toro, or Joaquin Phoenix and Johnny Depp (all of whom are a bit ripe to play characters whose stories begin at age 19).

“He’s always been Hollywood’s trembling-lipped sensitive boy,” pointed out one hopeful fan about Depp. Another opined that Jude Law’s “good looks and intense charm would make even a straight cowboy swoon.” Both Depp and Law have played gay before (in “Before Night Falls” and “Wilde,” respectively).

Some computer-savvy cinephiles have gone so far as to create a beefcakey “Brokeback Mountain” poster featuring Josh Hartnett and Colin Farrell, who will reportedly play bi-curious in his upcoming role as Alexander the Great in “Alexander.”

The story by Proulx (“The Shipping News”), which originally appeared in the New Yorker, has been adapted by Larry McMurtry (“Terms of Endearment,” “The Last Picture Show”) and his partner, Diana Ossana. Director Lee (“The Ice Storm,” Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) has chosen to make it his follow-up to last summer’s “The Hulk,” which was viewed as a commercial and critical disappointment. Lee’s longtime co-writer, James Schamus, who runs Focus Features, a division of Universal Pictures, will produce the picture with Ossana. Shooting is set to begin this summer.

Schamus, also a Columbia University film professor and co-founder of the now-defunct independent film bastion Good Machine, said via e-mail that he could not comment on casting decisions before anything has been made official, since it would “inevitably result in injured feelings and misunderstandings.” But, he wrote, “it’s still in process, and it’s been remarkably hassle free — no one has raised even an eyebrow and people across the board are responding in a really passionate way to the story and the characters.”

That not an eyebrow would be raised at the casting of two tadpole heartthrobs to play young men who get it on in a pup tent, share a passionate kiss on a windblown night and get gruffly teary-eyed as they talk about their unutterable feelings for each other is almost too Pollyanna-ish to be believed. But Scott Rudin (“The Hours,” “The Stepford Wives”) — who planned to make “Brokeback Mountain” in the late 1990s with Gus Van Sant (“Good Will Hunting”) directing, but now has no connection to the movie — agreed.

“It’s an amazing project; I’m incredibly jealous. And I don’t get jealous,” Rudin says. As for the process of signing up willing actors, he laughed at the notion that it would be difficult. “You’ve got a great filmmaker and parts for two movie stars. I can’t imagine why any actor would not want to play one of those roles. Anyone who gets in that movie is lucky to be there; it’s an absolutely beautiful script. Who would want to turn that down?”

But not everyone is confident that bona fide movie stars would risk their straight cred by mounting steeds and locking lips. One Hollywood executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, says, “Realistically, let’s talk about the giggle factor. I mean, it is a story about gay cowboys! That is the most daring thing you can do.” If the I’s do get dotted on Gyllenhaal and Ledger’s contracts, it’s worth noting that both will run less of a risk of being “taken for gay” than many of their colleagues; Gyllenhaal dates supercute wunderkind Kirsten Dunst, while Ledger squires Naomi Watts, 11 years his senior, to lots of events covered by Us Weekly.

Sean Griffin, an assistant professor of cinema and television at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was even skeptical that the film could actually get produced as advertised. He says, “When studio money [from Focus Features' parent company Universal] is involved, you never know how far things are actually going to go. You never know who’s going to actually show up for this thing. I’ll withhold judgment until I actually see a major on-screen kiss.”

Griffin is alluding to Hollywood’s habit of bleaching movies about homosexuals of their sensuality and romance. Films like “54″ and “Fried Green Tomatoes” were, in the words of one producer, “totally de-lezzed” or “de-gayed.” “A Beautiful Mind,” Ron Howard’s multiple-Oscar winner about mathematician John Nash, glossed over his reported homosexual relationships. Even “Philadelphia,” a Columbia TriStar movie hailed as Hollywood’s first gay love story, showed little sign that Tom Hanks, in an Oscar-garnering performance as a man in the late stages of AIDS, had ever met, much less made love to, his partner, played by Antonio Banderas.

What we’ve been left with have been a raft of fabulously witty and stylish characters played by openly gay actor Rupert Everett (“My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “The Next Best Thing”), tortured, foreign gay artists (Stephen Frye as Oscar Wilde in “Wilde,” Jonathan Pryce as Lytton Strachey in “Carrington,” Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud in “Total Eclipse” and Javier Bardem as Reinaldo Arenas in “Before Night Falls”), and that old chestnut, the gay hustler/psychopath/drug-addict/serial killer (“The Silence of the Lambs,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “High Art,” “My Own Private Idaho”).

But short some Hollywood alchemy that reworks the very DNA of the “Brokeback” script, the film can’t possibly duck down any of these escape routes. First published in the New Yorker in 1997, where it won both an O. Henry short story prize and a National Magazine Award, and then in Proulx’s 1999 story collection “Close Range,” it’s the tale of sheepherder Ennis Del Mar and rodeo rider Jack Twist. The two men meet and fall in love as 19-year-olds in 1963, tending a herd on the titular Wyoming mountain. The tale follows the men’s clandestine relationship for 20 years: their marriages to women, the birth of their children, regular mountaintop assignations, the impossibility of their permanent union, and the gradual acceptance of the grave repercussions of their love.

The story is, very simply, about its two main characters and their passion for each other. There is no murder mystery, no one suffering from AIDS, no drug addiction and no heterosexual romance to move the plot along and distract from the homosexual relationship.

The rights to the story have bounced around Hollywood since its publication. Schamus had them briefly when he was still at Good Machine. Rudin later planned to make the movie with director Van Sant (at the height of his mainstream popularity after the success of “Good Will Hunting”). It wasn’t long before it was rumored that that film’s stars, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, would take on the roles of Ennis and Jack. But the project couldn’t quite get off the ground under Van Sant and was later offered to Kimberly Peirce (“Boys Don’t Cry”) and Todd Haynes (“Poison,” “Far From Heaven”). It languished in no man’s land for several years before Lee and Schamus picked it up again in November 2003.

It will now be up to Lee and his actors to determine how raunchy or demure the physical relationship between the two taciturn Westerners will get on-screen. A draft of the script is noncommittal on this point, allowing room for the prim and the explicit in its description of Jack and Ennis’ first sexual encounter: “AS THE FOLLOWING ACTION OCCURS, WE PULL AWAY TO THE NIGHT LANDSCAPE, AND WE HEAR ONLY THE SOUNDS … THE BELT BEING UNBUCKLED, RUSTLE OF JEANS, ENNIS SPITTING, SHARP INTAKES OF BREATH … ENNIS raises up, gets to his knees, unbuckles his belt, shoves his pants down with one hand, uses the other to haul JACK up on all fours … JACK doesn’t resist … ENNIS spits in the palm of his hand, puts it on himself. They go at it in silence, except for a few sharp intakes of breath.”

According to this early draft of the script, it is only after “ENNIS shudders” that “THE CAMERA MOVES BACK INSIDE THE TENT, as both fall asleep.”

Later, in one of the screenplay’s most powerful moments, the two men — each married and a father — meet again after a separation of many years, supposedly to share some platonic, ass-slapping drinks as straight men. But when they meet on the very visible stairway to Ennis’ apartment, they “seize each other by the shoulders, hug mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying sonofabitch, sonofabitch. Then, as easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths come together.”

It’s the kind of sad-happy-hot scene that — when well-cast — can shoot sexual currents off the screen, sparking the hearts and libidos of receptive audiences. But those audiences are used to getting singed by Bacall and Bogart, by Deborah Winger and Richard Gere, by Kate and Leo. Are they ready for the unbridled lust of Gyllenhaal and Ledger?

“In the ’60s and ’70s and early ’80s, various studios tried to see if things like this might work,” says Griffin. “They even tried a full-on romance, ‘Making Love,’ in 1982, where there was an on-screen kiss. It was about the relationship between these two men. And people ran screaming out of the theaters. There was major fleeing up the aisles. And that’s exactly what’s kept people worried. That’s why you didn’t see Antonio Banderas and Tom Hanks kissing on-screen in ‘Philadelphia.’”

But that’s just the sort of fear that many hope is fading. Stephen Macias, GLAAD’s brand-spanking-new entertainment media director, says, “GLAAD certainly hopes that as gay characters and gay stories continue to evolve, films will focus on the sexiness, the romance … that our sex lives won’t be edited out anymore. From what I’ve been hearing about this film, progress is being made.”

Rudin points out that these days there are more outlets for films than there were even five years ago. “When I had ['Brokeback Mountain'], it was a very, very tough thing to get made. Basically, studios didn’t want to make it. There are many more avenues for smaller movies now. And I think it’s really smart for Focus to make it. Whatever it turns out to be it will be a lightning rod for the press.”

And the press loves nothing more than gay lightning rods. Perhaps you’ve heard, as Griffin put it, that “gay is the new black.” Sure, Will doesn’t have sex with men and seems strangely attracted to Grace. And yes, “Queer Eye’s” Fab Five intersect with Amos and Andy in several critical cultural capacities. That gay reality show, “Boy Meets Boy,” was, as one writer put it, “a good natured gay-baiting miniseries.” But some television has made real strides. “Six Feet Under” features a relationship between two men, one of whom is a retired cop. They kiss, embrace, fight, and go to bed and to couples’ therapy together.

Griffin argues that the recent embrace of all things gay isn’t to be laughed at. The more gay characters populate the pop-culture landscape, the less pressure will be faced by their progeny. “No one film suddenly has to be the holy grail,” says Griffin.

According to another scholar, it’s perfectly appropriate that “Brokeback Mountain” may be the movie that shatters Hollywood’s gay-sex taboo. Chris Packard, an adjunct professor at New York University’s Gallatin School and the author of the forthcoming book “Queer Cowboys,” says that this story “makes plain what’s implicit in the cowboy stereotype, in terms of an alley-cat, roaming sexuality that is always alive. Cowboys are such central figures in pop culture and such idealizations of mainstream macho masculinity that we should start to include the homoerotic aspect of that masculinity. They are like the fathers of the civilized culture that’s going to follow them into the wilderness.”

Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” is entertaining in a glossy, mindless way — every corner of it is packed with hyperkinetic life, which is not to say that it’s likely to stick in your memory for more than a few hours after you’ve seen it. The screenplay and story are credited to no fewer than five writers, and that’s not even counting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the characters — and brought them to life with his elegant prose — in the first place. Ritchie seems to think that a detective-and-doctor team who solve crimes by, oh, thinking about them just isn’t dynamic enough for the screen, so he turns Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson — played by Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law — into action heroes: They kick, punch and karate-chop their way through various scenarios in which the cutting is fast, even when the motion is slow, and the computer-generated effects are plentiful.

I’m not the only one to consider “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” a very great and deeply misunderstood film; others as disparate as Andrew Sarris and the late Stan Brakhage have more or less agreed with me, as well as my friend and favorite academic critic, James Naremore. (Click the link above to read my full review.) But it’s also clear to me that any ordinary auteurist way of processing cinema can’t begin to handle this masterwork adequately: Reading it simply as a Spielberg film, as most detractors do, or even trying to read it simply as a Kubrick film, is a pretty futile exercise with limited rewards, even though the fingerprints of both directors are all over it. Seeing it as a perpetually unresolved dialectic between Kubrick and Spielberg starts to yield a complicated kind of sense — an ambiguity where the bleakest pessimism and the most ecstatic kind of feel-good enchantment swiftly alternate and even occasionally blend, not to mention a far more enriching experience, however troubling and unresolved. As a profound meditation on the difference between what’s human and what isn’t, it also constitutes one of the best allegories about cinema that I know.

Film Salon has invited a group of special guests to write about their favorite film(s) of the 2000s. To read the entire series, go here.

The Weinstein Co.

Jude Law and Norah Jones kiss in “My Blueberry Nights.”

You can argue that the Chinese-born, Hong Kong-based filmmaker Wong Kar-wai was jumping off a cliff by making “My Blueberry Nights” — a movie written in English, shot in the United States, and starring an untested pop singer with no acting experience — but you can’t argue it was the first time. In eight feature films spread over two decades, Wong has made a violent gangland drama, a period romance, a 1960s coming-of-age picture, an elliptical science-fiction epic and a tale of bohemian gay lovers shot in Argentina. It’s difficult to say whether any of his pictures belong to the same genre as any of the others, but they’re all defiantly Wong Kar-wai films that seem to fuse the traditions of Western and Eastern art cinema, languorous dreamlike experiences where plot is secondary to mood and where the beauty of each episode, each face, each room and each moment is paramount.

Having seen two versions of “My Blueberry Nights” — the cut that was screened at Cannes last May, and the slightly shorter, less complicated edit opening this week in the U.S. — I’ve pretty well concluded that it’s a noble experiment that doesn’t quite work. (If anything, I liked the first version better. Or else it was just Cannes, and I was drunk on good wine and louche atmosphere.) Fans of Wong’s now-classic Hong Kong films, from “Days of Being Wild” and “Ashes of Time” to his international hit “In the Mood for Love” and the incoherent but gorgeous “2046,” will likely find “My Blueberry Nights” lightweight and sentimental. On the other hand, anybody who shows up to see Jude Law and Norah Jones in a love story may be mystified by Wong’s near-plotless Americana road movie, which contrives improbable means of keeping the central couple apart as long as possible.

As I wrote when I reviewed the first version at Cannes, you need to detach yourself from any desire for plausible reality if you want to enjoy “My Blueberry Nights.” More than that, you have to survive the film’s awkward and embarrassing first 10 minutes, because it gets a lot better after that. The New York coffee shop run by Jeremy (Law), where heartbroken Elizabeth (Jones) starts showing up to drown her sorrows in late-night coffee and slabs of left-over blueberry pie, has nothing to do with the real New York of 2008. It’s a vision drawn from 1940s films and Edward Hopper paintings, infused with Wong’s trademark midnight-fluorescent colors. (As Wong explained in our conversation, he used a restaurant in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood and various exteriors in Brooklyn and Queens.) If there are some similarities between this film and Wong’s 1994 shopping-mall romance “Chungking Express” — still my favorite of all his movies — “My Blueberry Nights” is even closer to Alan Rudolph’s wistful 1984 indie hit “Choose Me.”

Jones is a lovely woman and a likable screen presence, but not much of an actress; she plays Elizabeth as a good girl with bad posture who doesn’t quite realize that she’s beautiful. Both Elizabeth and Jeremy, a cheerful Mancunian expat who’s somehow become a diner proprietor, are presumed to be so dense, and so damaged by their respective broken hearts, that they don’t notice how movieland-perfect they are for each other. (As ever, Law is a total ham. I always wonder why his slightly self-mocking pretty-boy shtick doesn’t bug me more than it does, but I always like him.) On one hand, this plot element is pretty damn far-fetched, but on the other, it underscores how stilted and inert the film’s early scenes are, and how devoid of sexual chemistry the Jones-Law pairing is.

That said, once Elizabeth hits the road and becomes a bystander to other people’s doomed love stories instead of a protagonist in her own, Wong’s film — shot by Darius Khondji, instead of his longtime collaborator Christopher Doyle — begins to exert a peculiar charm. Elizabeth tarries in Memphis awhile, befriending an alcoholic cop (a simply great performance from David Strathairn) who can’t let go of an evil, evil woman (Rachel Weisz, in a traffic-stopping role). Later, in rural Ely, Nev., Elizabeth explores a Thelma & Louise friendship, possessing an infinitesimal lesbian undertone, with a trashy tomboy gambler played by Natalie Portman. Both these episodes are arguably much more interesting than the question of when Elizabeth’s getting back to New York, or whether Jeremy will still be there waiting for her. (Chan Marshall, aka the singer Cat Power, is terrific in a cameo as Jeremy’s ex-girlfriend. And see if you can find Tim Roth, in an uncredited role as a sleazeball in a Hawaiian shirt.)

I had to resist the tendency to pick these characters and settings apart, but they’re not meant to be naturalistic. They’re snippets of American archetype, picture postcards mailed from a Chinese director’s road trip through our collective past. After discussing the film with Wong, I’m inclined to view it more generously, and not just because he was charming and his wife made me a cup of tea. The fact is, it’s awfully easy to sit in the audience and snicker knowingly at the most ungainly aspects of “My Blueberry Nights,” as a handful of younger critics were doing at the screening I attended last week.

If this film is in certain respects a failure, it’s an ambitious one, belonging to the same noble species as other intermittently terrible and thrilling films about America made by international directors, from Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” to Emir Kusturica’s “Arizona Dream” to Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Shy People” to Bruno Dumont’s “Twentynine Palms” … one could go on. Without those kinds of failures, maybe you don’t get the other kind of American films made by foreigners, like, say, “It Happened One Night” and “Vertigo” and “Sunset Blvd.”

I guess what I’m saying is that Wong Kar-wai has earned the right to jump off any cliff he damn well pleases. You can fall in love with the lighter-than-air, imagined-America sweetness of “My Blueberry Nights” or you can write outraged Internet screeds against it, as some offended Wong cultists have done. But it might also be wise to wait and see where Wong’s idiosyncratic journey takes him next. (Reportedly, that will be a long-delayed remake of Orson Welles’ 1947 “The Lady From Shanghai,” and there’s nobody better to take it on.) I met with Wong in his New York hotel room, a few hours after his arrival from Hong Kong. He speaks fluent English, but his grammar and syntax are not perfect; here and there I’ve cleaned up the transcript for clarity.

(You can listen to a complete audio podcast of this interview here.)

You’ve spent much of the last year going around the world talking about your decision to make a film in America, and in English. So I bet you’ve got a really good answer to that question. Why was this an important thing for you to take on in your career?

First of all, it’s because of Norah Jones. Obviously I cannot make her speak Cantonese, so I have to make the film in her language. The second thing is, I think, after “2046″ — a film I spent five years making — I tried to do something which is very different than that. I thought it might be a very nice idea to shoot in English, to shoot in a country where I’ve never worked before. It was something I wanted to do at that point.

I guess you can say that all of your films have been different — formally different from each other and in different genres. So in that sense it was truly what you’ve always done, take on something new with each new project.

I think so. The only difference is here, the language is so different and it is not a language with which I am familiar, which I can command. The process at the very beginning is a bit difficult but it also gives me a chance to open myself up. That means I have to ask my crew and my cast to collaborate with me. This film, in a certain way, is almost like a student film. We worked together instead of saying, “I have an idea and I want everyone to do it this way or that way.”

I know you co-wrote the screenplay with Lawrence Block, the New York mystery novel writer. How did that come about? How did you meet him?

I’m a big fan of Larry and I like his work, especially the Matthew Scudder series. At that point, I had been discussing with Larry to work on something, maybe to adapt one of his books. Then somehow I had a meeting with Norah and then we decide to make a film together. The story is based on a short film that I made a few years ago. I wrote it myself and then I needed someone to help me, so I proposed [the idea] to Larry. At first I proposed that he write the New York chapter, but he really understood most of the characters so I asked him to help me with the whole story.

You’ve said the starting point was Norah Jones. She’s obviously a beautiful woman and a talented performer, but she had not acted before. Why were you so convinced that you could make a movie with her?

First of all, it’s basically instinct, because casting is really like love at first sight. You look at the face and you have a sense that this is something worth working on and this is a person that is very interesting. You can create a story out of her. Also, Norah has been performing since she was 15, so I had no doubts that she could act.

The story begins and ends in New York but along the way it’s a road movie. In that sense it’s a very classic American film genre.

To tell you the truth, the original story took place in New York, in that diner. It’s almost like a “Nighthawks at the Diner” story. But shooting the whole film in New York became too expensive for the production so we decided to move part of the story out of New York. We decided to shoot this film fairly quickly, and I thought the best way to do that, just because it was Norah, was a road tour, like a band. So we traveled across the country and ended up back in New York.

Once the Norah Jones character hits the road with a broken heart, the first place she lands is Memphis. I think that’s my favorite section. Did you actually shoot in Memphis?

That’s Memphis. We took three trips across the country to decide where we were going to shoot the rest of the film. I thought we should definitely have something from the South. We went to New Orleans after Katrina, like a week after Katrina. At that point, Louisiana was offering very good rebate for film productions, but I decided not to do it because the film had nothing to do with Katrina and I didn’t want to take advantage of that. So we moved on to Memphis and I remember the night we got there, the first place we went was to the bar [that became a location in the film]. In most towns, the first way to understand the town is to drop by the bar. The people there will tell you a lot about the place. I was amazed by the structure of this corner because right across the street there’s another diner and there’s the streetcar passing by. It reminded me of all those Tennessee Williams stories. He’s one of my favorite writers so it was interesting to make a stop in Memphis, to have all these blue, Tennessee Williams elements in it.

The Memphis story is about a busted-up love affair, with David Strathairn as an alcoholic cop and Rachel Weisz as the femme fatale who has broken his heart and maybe still loves him. It’s definitely very Tennessee Williams, archetypal.

For Norah, even though in this chapter she seems to be someone looking on from the side, in both characters — David and Rachel — is a reflection of herself. At first she identifies with David because he’s being cheated on and betrayed by the partners. But then she sees the perspective from the other side, from Rachel’s long conversation with her.

Later in the film, we get to Nevada, another place where lots of films have been set, and then you get the Western landscape. You have the story about Natalie Portman as a professional gambler, this tomboy, butch kind of woman. Did you need to find a story that was very specific to that landscape?

In fact, it was really by accident. We went to this small town called Ely, Nev., which is like five hours out of Las Vegas, because we got lost in the desert. We get to this small town and the first thing we notice is that in the gas station there is a Korean woman running a grocery store. It’s very strange. I speak a little bit of Korean and we became very friendly. She explained the background of this town, and it was really interesting. I felt like if Norah Jones’ character dropped by this town and spent some time there, it could be interesting, instead of going to Vegas, which is more or less expected.

There’s a tradition of great international filmmakers coming to America and making, with lesser or greater success, films about America, films that engage the archetypes of America. There are the obvious immigrant directors like Billy Wilder and Frank Capra, but I’m also thinking about Antonioni, Emir Kusturica, Wim Wenders, Bruno Dumont and other people. Did you think about that at any point?

I think no matter where we live, we all grew up with fragments of American culture. I think the most interesting and joyful aspects of making this movie was the joy of revisiting those fragments and paying homage to them. It’s very hard for me to think like an American. No matter how many trips I take, it’ll take a lifetime. I can only be a visitor or a traveler.

Some reviewers have called attention to logical inconsistencies in the plot: Why does Elizabeth travel all the way across the country to buy a car and drive back? I wonder if you would argue that asking those questions is to miss the point of what you’re trying to accomplish in the movie, what you want the viewer to see?

I think so, because there’s so many ways to explain why and, in fact, it’s not the point. I think the point of this film is about letting go. At certain points, we all have to let go of something which means a lot to us but somehow we realize it’s not that way anymore. It doesn’t only apply to relationships, it can apply to a lot of things. We’re living in a world, in a daily life, that has so many routines. We rely on something, we’re obsessed with something, but sometimes you have to let go.

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Still from “The Cool School.”

I was tied up in screenings on Monday, and when I wasn’t doing that I was hunkered down, trying to sharpen my mind and harden my spirit, or something of the sort, in preparation for a Tuesday interview with Wong Kar-wai. How do you tell an artist you admire immensely that you think he’s made a dreadful mistake, one that raises a whole range of questions about his entire career? I’ve now seen “My Blueberry Nights” — that’s Wong’s forthcoming English-language debut, an episodic American road movie with Norah Jones, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz — twice, first last year as the opening-night film at Cannes, and second a week ago. (It opens in the United States on Friday.) I guess he re-cut it in between or something, but it hasn’t improved.

I think “My Blueberry Nights” now takes its place in the canon of ill-advised American road trips made by international art-film directors. (See also Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point,” Emir Kusturica’s “Arizona Dream,” Bruno Dumont’s “Twentynine Palms” and the career of Andrei Konchalovsky.) That’s already a lot more than I should be saying before I even meet Wong, but I’m guessing he won’t be up early this morning Googling himself. His publicists might, and in that case, lucky me.

Not much to report from the weekend box office, although Steve Ramos at indieWIRE is on it, as usual. The semi-controversial “Chapter 27,” with Jared Leto as John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman, opened strongly — but that was at one theater, the Angelika Film Center in Manhattan, which gives us no idea how broadly this little schizo-world picture will draw. (“Chapter 27″ opens this week in Los Angeles, and will reportedly reach 40-plus screens by the end of May.)

A disparate pair of foreign films I reviewed last week, the great Russian director Alexander Sokurov’s oblique wartime drama “Alexandra” and Italian filmmaker Daniele Luchetti’s far more mainstream ’60s family epic “My Brother Is an Only Child,” also had strong one-screen Gotham bows. (Does that sound like trade-magazine writing or what?) “My Brother” will open in Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington over the next couple of weeks, but I don’t know anything about the future of “Alexandra” yet. Christophe Honoré’s odd, winsome French musical “Love Songs” continues to do well after two weeks, but it too has yet to venture across the Hudson River.

Laura Dunn’s gorgeous land-war documentary “The Unforeseen” also had a terrific single-theater weekend, but that theater was in Austin, Texas, which is Dunn’s hometown and the site of its haunting and dramatic tale. It’s great to see that. Maybe all the market segmentation (or niche marketing or narrowcasting or whatever you want to call it) in the movie business is starting to make room for a return to regional American filmmaking, and regional distribution as well. I hear about small movies all the time that find audiences outside the traditional New York-L.A. nexus, and I vow, hear and now, to pay more attention to them.

Morgan Neville’s new documentary “The Cool School” is a fine example of regional history and regional filmmaking, and ought to find its biggest and most loyal audience on the West Coast. Since Neville’s subject is how Los Angeles’ nascent visual arts scene, from the mid-’50s to the mid-’60s, played a crucial role in the history of modern art — and in the birth of what we’d now call postmodernism — it’s odd that right now “The Cool School” is only playing at New York’s Cinema Village, right in the heartland of old-line Abstract Expressionism.

Neville packs a lot of fascinating characters and enthralling history into his imaginative, jazz-inflected film, but the subject is too large and too complicated for 90 minutes. Several of the macho, hard-drinking artists who drew ideas (and colors and materials) from car culture and put the City of Angels on the modern art map went on to greater fame, like Ed Ruscha, Ed Kienholz and their architect pal Frank Gehry. The ones who were sucked under and died or disappeared, like Billy Al Bengston and Wallace Berman, might be even more interesting. Each almost seems to merit his own film. Speaking broadly, the L.A. artists were a group of hypermasculine, hypercompetitive, anti-intellectual assholes (a sign over the bar at Barney’s Beanery, seen several times in the film: “FAGOTS STAY OUT”), which does not diminish their accomplishments but may explain, in part, why their movement imploded in the late ’60s.

Neville’s movie is mainly about Walter Hopps and Irving Blum, the mismatched pair of entrepreneurs behind West L.A.’s legendary Ferus Gallery. Unbelievable as this may seem to some New Yorkers, Ferus hosted Andy Warhol’s first solo show, and for several years was far ahead of the New York art world (which resisted Pop and clung to Abstract Expressionism). Even Blum and Hopps’ story of ambition, betrayal, daring and venality — not to mention the beautiful ice blonde who married them both — gets a bit compressed here. Still, for art buffs this is a wild ride, and packed with stuff you probably won’t know about. Jeff Bridges narrates, and Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell (who both followed the L.A. art scene closely in their salad days) pop up here and there to offer stoned, laconic commentary.

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Thursday, May 17, 2007 3:45 PM UTC

Beyond the Multiplex

Norah Jones and Jude Law seduce viewers with slow, lonely smooches and bites of blueberry pie as Cannes kicks off.

By Andrew O'Hehir

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You have to suspend all varieties of disbelief and float along with “My Blueberry Nights,” which opened the 60th Festival de Cannes with a splashy red-carpet premiere on Wednesday night. That’s rather like the attitude required by this festival, both so inconvenient and so delightful, and by the storybook landscape of the Côte d’Azur. Reactions to the opening film have been muted here so far, more polite than enthusiastic. Costar Jude Law was the principal focus of paparazzi attention, climbing the steps of the Palais des Festivals in Ray-Bans and a classic tuxedo; with all the gentlemanly grace you’d expect, he tried to deflect the focus toward a winsome, awkward, clearly overwhelmed Norah Jones, the film’s unlikely lead. (I’m underqualified as a fashion critic, but did she choose the slightly dorky gown, with the high waist and poofy sleeves, on purpose?)

“My Blueberry Nights” may not quite be what fans of either Jones or Wong Kar-wai — directing his first film in English — are expecting. It’s a late-night, lovelorn mood piece in a minor key, not complicated or convoluted, finally more confection than substance. I’m not the first person to observe that it bears a startling, if presumably accidental, resemblance to Alan Rudolph’s 1984 indie hit “Choose Me.” Still, the longer this slice of fanciful blueberry-pie Americana sits with me, the better I like it.

This wistful, unobtrusive film has almost no connection to realism or plausibility. (The director’s recent Chinese films, like “2046″ and “In the Mood for Love,” certainly aren’t interested in those things either, and one could debate the naturalism of his early work as well.) It was shot by Wong and cinematographer Darius Khondji in a series of iconic American locations: Manhattan, Memphis, Tenn., the Nevada desert, Venice Beach, Calif. Except for a handful of exteriors, most of it could have been made on a soundstage; you learn no more about what Memphis looks like in 2007 from this movie than you do from listening to Elvis sing “Mystery Train.”

Even by Wong’s standards, the film has a dreamy midnight aesthetic, along with a supersaturated color palette that throbs with purple, gold, indigo and every other Crayola shade you can imagine. I’m not sure what burnt sienna and raw sienna actually are, but I guarantee you they’re in here. The shadows in this movie have shadows; the grains of film shed and subdivide into dark snowflakes of black and crimson and green.

What’s the point of all this gorgeousness? That may pose a difficult question for some viewers. I guess it’s just meant to put you in the mood for love, as it were. Or at least in the mood to watch a couple of beautiful and lovelorn loners, Elizabeth (Jones) and Jeremy (Law), moon around in an empty New York diner, eating blueberry pie and pining for their lost whoevers. We’re not merely supposed to buy Law as a diner proprietor but also supposed to imagine that these two people have been unceremoniously dumped by their true loves, and that Elizabeth wanders off on a no-destination road trip after Jeremy has kissed her. (Pop quiz for female readers: Jude Law has just smooched the pie-à-la-mode stains off your upper lip. Is your very first reaction to buy a bus ticket for parts unknown?)

All that stuff bothered me at first, along with the fact that Jones can’t really act. When she’s required to display emotion about the former boyfriend, it’s more like watching somebody miss the bus or lose her cellphone than undergo a very early midlife crisis. Still, the camera loves her, as they say. (If there’s one thing Wong Kar-wai knows how to do better than any other filmmaker, it’s shoot beautiful women so they look their best.) She has a little of the young Julia Roberts, or a less extreme Angelina Jolie, about her. As the film progresses Wong seems to make more modest demands of her; on her road trip from one service-sector job to the next, Elizabeth is a likable wallflower, an observer of other people’s lives rather than the subject of her own.

Similarly, the chemistry between Law and Jones is nearly null at first — when Jeremy nuzzles in to give Elizabeth that sleepy smackeroo, I half-wondered if he was really after the dribbles of ice cream — but Wong and Khondji eventually create it out of images. There’s no nudity in “My Blueberry Nights,” and if anything it’s aggressively chaste. Except for a few cuss words it could probably be rated G. But the curves and swells and furrowed brows and twitching lashes of Law and Jones, captured in one lingering close-up after another, become their own kind of erotic landscape.

But because this is a movie about unfulfilled longing and delayed gratification, Elizabeth can’t just hang around Wong’s painterly New York night, watching the subway clatter overhead and inhaling pieces of blueberry pie with a really cute guy who happens to be single too. Jeremy’s diner doesn’t look like anyplace in the real New York, but I eventually quit worrying about that once I realized that no part of the movie happens in the real world. Wong’s America is the mythic, heartbroken America of Edward Hopper paintings and rhythm and blues records and Jim Thompson novels, and you can pretty much baste yourself in that flavor or move on.

In some ways, the nonromance between Elizabeth and Jeremy is the least substantial of the three roughly parallel segments of “My Blueberry Nights.” Once Elizabeth ends up in Memphis, where she becomes a waitress and bartender named Lizzie, who observes the not-so-gradual disintegration of a drunken cop (David Strathairn), the film’s prettiness and artifice finally yield some grit. Sitting in the moonlit shadows of Lizzie’s dive bar, Strathairn demonstrates why he’s among the finest of American character actors. With his bowed head, a few tired gestures and an almost masklike expression, he shows us a decent man drawing very near the end of a road paved with bad women (the worst of them played by Rachel Weisz) and bad liquor.

In the film’s Nevada section, Lizzie becomes Beth, a waitress at a backwater casino — I’m pretty sure it’s the Hotel Nevada, in Ely — who befriends a vivacious, tough-talkin’ Texas card shark named Leslie (broadly and enjoyably played by Natalie Portman, in a bad blond do and a succession of almost-trashy outfits). Wong and co-writer Lawrence Block (the well-known mystery novelist) flirt with cliché here, or maybe they embrace it whole-hog. After Leslie’s big showdown at the poker table (her weedy nemesis is Tim Roth, in an almost unrecognizable cameo), she and Beth hit the road in Leslie’s Jag for some lightweight “Thelma and Louise”-style adventures.

Neither that detour nor the film as a whole quite manages the emotional payoff it aims for, but by the end of this slight, charming, vaguely silly picture I was enchanted anyway. Art-house devotees of Wong’s work may have a tough time accepting the setting or the star (or the lightweight, sentimental tone) of “My Blueberry Nights.” And who knows whether Jones’ fans want to see her in a nearly plotless movie where she can’t make up her mind to snog with Jude Law. Still, this movie will seduce viewers one at a time with slow, lonely smooches and forkfuls of blueberry pie, even if it probably won’t be remembered as a major career event for its director and stars.

All in all, it wasn’t an uproariously successful opening for Cannes, but anybody left in a bad mood by “My Blueberry Nights” — not to mention the blue skies, blue sea and pink wine out in the French night — is just a sourpuss. Beginning Thursday, new films will roll onto the Riviera beaches like waves; among the most promising weekend premieres are Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Flight of the Red Balloon” (inspired by the famous 1950s French short film), Michael Moore’s already-controversial “Sicko” and the Coen brothers’ violent western, “No Country for Old Men.” More soon.

* * * * For more coverage of the Cannes Film Festival, click here.

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