Word: wais
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...past winners. Finally, it doesn't help much to imagine which of the competing films the jury president would like best. In 2002, when David Lynch was president, the winning film was Roman Polanski's very traditional The Pianist. Last year, ultra-hip auteur Wong Kar Wai gave the Palme d'Or to Ken Loach's political epic The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Go figure...
...Take the opening attraction, Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights. Much heralded as the Hong Kong master's first English-language feature, and starring pop diva Norah Jones in her acting debut, this fable of a lovelorn woman's jaunt across the U.S.-from New York to Memphis to Las Vegas and back again-lurches in and out of plausibility without ever quite weaving the slo-mo magic Wong brings to his homegrown fare. But then, just as the viewer's patience is being tried by the relentless despair Jones' character appears to live in, Natalie Portman shows...
...there's nothing wrong with the camera falling in love with its subject. Star quality is an essential factor in movie mystique. Directors are also free to show a lovely face in slow motion, as you do endlessly with Nevins'. The Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai has built a brilliant career on that technique. You selected Wong's longtime cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, in part because he would know how to work a similarly glorious magic...
...Wong tends to stick with it, through multiple movies. He conceived the 1994 Chungking Express as three stories but shot only two; the third tale became his next film, Fallen Angels. A few years later he made In the Mood for Love, about a writer (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) falling for a married woman in 60s Hong Kong; that character reappeared, with four other alluring females, in 2046. Wong knows that movies are supposed to run between an hour and a half and two hours, but that's not natural for him. The Hand, a lovely fable about an aging...
...Jones, a very appealing performer in concerts and interviews, is herself half-Asian (her father is the celebrated Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar), and thus fits snugly into the Wong Kar Wai iconography. We see her, chin on hand, staring sadly into the middle distance; and Wong shows this not-very-much-happening in his patented dreamy slo-mo. Jones also has a similar background to many performers from Wong's Hong Kong films: Leung, Leslie Cheung, Faye Wong, Andy Lau, Leon Lai and dozens of others were Canto-pop stars before they were accomplished actors...