看电影学英语《蓝莓之夜》

　　Wong Kar Wai, the Hong Kong auteur（特指“电影导演”）, has made his first movie all in English and set in the USA--and built around Grammy Award singer Norah Jones. More coherent（连贯的，一致的） than many of Wong‘s efforts, it’s been accused of being a “trifle”（琐事；少量）--or is it just that the plot（情节） seems silly now that it‘s all clear and in English? Like all Wong’s work, this is a film that‘s romantic, sad, and gorgeous（华丽的；极好的） to look at from first to last and full of strong, catchy（吸引人的） pop-blues-country music (Ry Couder did the score（配乐）). The beautiful Ms. Jones’s character, variously known as Elizabeth, Lizzie, Beth, or Betty, turns up at a New York café run by Jeremy (Jude Law), a guy from Manchester, England, drenched in（被…浸透） love-longing because her man has dumped（抛弃） her for somebody else. Jeremy has a jar full of keys from patrons, each with a story, and Lizzie gives him hers, hoping her boyfriend will pick them up again. Jeremy has his own lost love, Katya (Cat Power); she‘ll turn up later on just to say goodbye. Jeremy’s keys stand for（象征；支持） doors he himself doesn‘t want to close.?

　　Though Lizzie’s boyfriend never turns up（出现；发生）, Jeremy and Lizzie begin to have late night chats and sugar orgies（orgy的复数 纵欲）, she eating a piece of blueberry pie with ice cream--picking blueberry because that‘s the pie that’s always left over at the end of the day. There‘s a fight in the café, and Jeremy plays around with a surveillance camera（监控摄像机）, which he seems to use as a kind of diary. Soon he will be alone, and Lizzie will be away.

　　This time instead of improvising（improvise即兴创作；即兴表演） as in the past, which among other things contributed to his last film, 2046, a kind of summation（合计） of his Chinese themes and characters, taking five years to finish, Wong made up his story, with Norah in mind, and then had it turned into a finished screenplay (subject to plenty of revisions, of course) by crime novelist Lawrence Block. This one had a low budget and took just a couple of months to make. It really took a year to do the editing, but Wong had that finished, to everyone’s surprise, just in time for My Blueberry Nights to be shown as the opener at Cannes （戛纳）last year.

　　Like Wong‘s other films, this one encapsulates（压缩；将…装进胶囊） several different stories. The second one comes when Lizzie decides to “cross the street” to revisit Jeremy by the “longest way possible,” which turns out to be a trip to Memphis and Nevada and points in between, thousands of miles and nearly a year--a time of self-discovery（自我发现）, no doubt (though she doesn’t observably change), and a period to avoid the inevitable（必然的；不可避免的） romance with Jeremy. Landing in Memphis Lizzie works at two jobs, saving up money to buy a car. At a bar she encounters（遭遇；邂逅） the drama of the drunken cop Arnie Copeland (David Strathairn) and his estranged（疏远的；不和的） wife, Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz). Both are fine, acting their heads off in scenes heady with barroom dysfunction（功能紊乱）.

　　Coming after As Tears Go By（《旺角卡门》1988）, Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express（《重庆森林》1994）, Ashes of Time, Fallen Angels（《堕天使》1995）, Happy Together, In the Mood For Love（《花样年华》2000）, and 2046, Wong‘s excursion into America is completely consistent and logical. Those who seem disappointed, may miss the ellipses and madcap（狂妄的；粗鲁的） improve（同improvise） of the earlier films, and may have failed to notice that they were full of pop novel gimmicks and romantic cuteness. Wong’s sentimentality（多愁善感的） passes muster because of cryptic（神秘的；意义模糊的） story lines, poetic voice-overs, hypnotic uses of music, and adventurous camera work--mostly by Christopher Doyle, here replaced by the half-French and wholly brilliant Darius Khondji --made infinitely rich by complex editing. My Blueberry Nights is full of criss-cross angles, fast overlaps, closeups（特写镜头） so shallow atmospheric Americana may go unnoticed, till a lovely panorama flits by. Color is typically warm and dense. The effect is to make every frame a pleasure.

　　Maybe Wong never did anything better than Days of Being Wild（《阿飞正传》1991）, the first film in which he became truly himself. But what does it matter? The quintessential（精髓的） stylist, he cannot make a film that doesn‘t give rich aesthetic pleasure（审美享受）.

　　Vocabulary List

　　Coherent /k???h??r?nt, -?h?r?nt/

　　Adj. If something is coherent, it is well planned, so that it is clear and sensible and all its parts go well with each other. 连贯的

　　例：He has failed to work out a coherent strategy for modernizing the service.

　　他无法想出一个连贯的策略来使该服务现代化。

　　Gorgeous /?ɡ??d??s/

　　Adj. If you say that something is gorgeous, you mean that it gives you a lot of pleasure or is very attractive. 十分宜人的; 很吸引人的

　　例：Gorgeous mountain scenery.

　　…壮观的山间景色。

　　Improvise /??mpr??va?z/

　　Vt./Vi.  If you improvise, you make or do something using whatever you have or without having planned it in advance. 临时拼凑

　　例：You need a wok with a steaming rack for this; if you don’t have one, improvise.

　　你需要一口带有蒸笼的锅，如果没有就临时凑合一下。

　　Inevitable /?n??v?t?b?l/

　　Adj.  If something is inevitable, it is certain to happen and cannot be prevented or avoided. 必然发生的

　　例：If the case succeeds, it is inevitable that other trials will follow.

　　如果这场官司获胜，其他审判必将效法。

　　Drenched in

　　The carbon matting, drenched in resin, is compressed into a mold to harden it. 跟读

　　这种碳垫子，还是树脂制品时就弄湿了，得压缩成型使其变硬。