Two giants of world cinema return in understated fashion, with mixed results

My Blueberry Nights (12A)

dir: Wong Kar Wai

The Boss of It All (15)

dir: Lars von Trier

Even geniuses have days when they are treading water rather than walking on it. The metaphor is particularly apt for My Blueberry Nights, a below-par film from Wong Kar Wai that's as wet as they come. The singer-songwriter Norah Jones plays Elizabeth, a lovelorn lass who bounces from New York to Memphis to Las Vegas, encountering along the way a sassy gambler (played by Natalie Portman), a boozy cop (played by David Strathairn) and the cop's cheating, flame-haired wife (Rachel Weisz). With Wong making his English-language debut, his direction has never seemed so stilted. Couldn't one of his actors have politely pointed out that no one speaks or behaves like these characters, at least not without being sectioned?

Here's an example. Recently jilted Elizabeth starts frequenting the New York diner run by Jeremy (Jude Law), a cheeky chappie who does wacky things like collecting lost keys in a jar. "I don't want to close those doors for ever," he explains. "Sometimes even if you have the keys, the door might not open," his ex warns him. "And even if it opens, the person you're looking for may not be there," he replies. And so on.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth turns out to be just as prone to this sort of guff as he is. "I've never been very good at confrontation," she sighs. "Some people enjoy it. Not me." A passable enough line, except that Jones delivers it in a dreamy voice immediately after being mugged, while wiping her bloody nose.

That I was thinking: "Forget the kooky monologue. Call the police! Cancel your credit cards!" probably says something unflattering about me. But the lack of convincing drama leaves this late-night, neon-frazzled, slow-motion dreamworld, so persuasive in Wong's Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, feeling distinctly bogus. And that allows spoilsport thoughts to creep in, breaking the spell the picture tries to cast.

The cinematographer Darius Khondji ensures that there isn't a frame in here that couldn't be hung on the walls of an overpriced restaurant or boutique hotel. But cinema isn't interior decorating: it is about making images flow together, something that My Blueberry Nights struggles to do. Certainly there's no progress in the script, which tells us that choices are like keys, the people we meet are like mirrors, and the world can be divided into peach cobblers, apple flans and blueberry pies. On the available evidence, I'd guess Wong is partial to cobblers.

Another giant of world cinema, Lars von Trier, also returns with an understated work. But while The Boss of It All (released 29 February) is a mere bagatelle, it has a devilish central idea, and a bone-dry comic tone reminiscent of von Trier's masterful TV serial The Kingdom. Kristoffer (Jens Albinus) is an unemployed actor of dubious ability who is all too happy to pose as the manager of an IT firm. The real manager, Ravn (Peter Gantzler), invented a fictitious absentee boss years ago, which came in handy whenever unpopular decisions had to be made. Now he's selling up, and the new buyers will deal with the head honcho only.

Like last year's Yella, which imagined hell as an endless series of soulless boardrooms, The Boss of It All presents office life as a breeding ground for absurdist horror. This being von Trier, one of the signatories of the Dogme 95 manifesto, it is no surprise that the film has been made according to a stringent new process; this time, it's Automavision, which dispenses with the director of photography and allows a computer to select the camera position at random. The clinical visual style only enhances the comedy, which quickly turns into farce as Kristoffer has to live down all the terrible things that he, as the boss, has supposedly done. Creative decisions may have been left partly to technology, but von Trier's film still has more authentic soul than anything in My Blueberry Nights.

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The Edge of Heaven (15)
dir: Fatih Akin
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Be Kind Rewind (12A)
dir: Michel Gondry
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Away From Her (12A)
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Speedy reissue of the 2006 drama about Alzheimer’s, starring Oscar-nominated Julie Christie.

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