Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights is poorly written and claustrophobically filmed, but Norah Jones is charming in her film debut. Jude Law’s enigmatic New York café owner consoles Jones over a breakup. He bears a Mancunian accent and an impenetrability which he used to great effect in Sleuth. Jones is too buried in grief to respond to the tousle-headed god, but she sets off across America, sending postcards at every stop.

In casting Jones, Wong wanted a naïf, and that’s what he got. Jones is expressionless but sweet. She looks very, very desi in closeup — huge eyes, a tiny, bindi-like mole between her eyes, a small silver nose ring. You can tell she has a lovely singing voice from her regular voice, with its husky undertone. It’s jarring to hear her on the soundtrack while she’s speaking in the same scene, like watching Bipasha Basu work out to ‘Beedi‘ in a Bombay gym.

The dialogue is risible, as if you had not noticed in Wong’s earlier flicks because they were subtitled. He’s more about mood, more a visual stylist; the movie feels a bit like Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s debacle Saawariya. Because the settings are familiar, not Asia in the future, Darius Khondji’s cinematography has less impact here.

Blueberry’s direction is at times cheesy and melodramatic. Rachel Weisz has a full-on screaming fit of the kind you see in Bollywood but not much any more in American flicks, like bad high school dramatic interp. Natalie Portman and Law get unnatural, unbelievable lines, and Law’s troubled relationship with her gambler father evokes Eric Bana in Lucky You. The metaphors used — keys, doors — are beyond obvious and lend themselves to grating, cliched dialogue from an MTV special.

The film is shot entirely in extreme closeup, which is easy on the budget but makes for frustrating viewing. It makes liberal use of grainy, dropped-frame mode and heavy film grain, like a bad music video. Many of the lines are obviously dubbed, not shot in sync sound, so the sound design is very artificial. I’m used to ’80s movies punching up individual scenes for romantic impact, not entire movies. It does work well in one scene where Jones is asleep, Law is leaning over her for a kiss, and the movie dubs in the faint screech of overhead subway trains.

What I liked: the movie’s general moodiness. Weisz’ femme fatale entrance, hips swaying, all woman. The gender inversion of a man tethered, a woman roaming across America free. David Strathairn’s solid performance, as always. Ry Cooder’s and Norah Jones’ music. Law and Jones’ upside-down Spiderman kiss.

Here’s the UK trailer.

Previously: My ‘Blueberry’ trailer, Hey Jude, ‘My Blueberry Nights’, Don’t Know Wai