Driving the Blues Away: Yuan and Letting Go in Wong Kar-Wai's My Blueberry Nights

For Chinese born, Hong Kong-based film director Wong Kar-Wai, creating his first English-language film for an American audience, My Blueberry Nights (2007), was an artistic and cultural leap. However, this was not the first time Wong has taken a risk with his work. His eight previous feature films include a gang drama, a period romantic piece, a science fiction epic, and a tale of gay lovers living in Argentina. He frequently fuses Eastern and Western art cinema and frames his characters with stunning visuals (O'Hehir, 2008). However, film critics reviewing My Blueberry Nights found the film to be lighter and more sentimental than his previous films (Coleman, 2008; O'Hehir, 2008).