All great stories are built around one essential element: somebody wants something really badly, and has difficulty getting it.Frodo Baggins really wants to destroy the ring. Dorothy really wants to go home to Kansas. Jai and Veeru really want to get Gabbar Singh. Bhuvan, in Lagaan, really wants to beat the British. Hamlet really wants to avenge his father's death. Romeo really wants Juliet. There is no story if Romeo and Juliet are just sort of fond of each other. Or if the Montagues and Capulets are willing to let bygones be bygones.
My Blueberry Nights fails because it ignores this basic rule.
Its about a charming, pretty and kind girl (Norah Jones) who is abandoned by her boyfriend. She leaves her apartment keys with a hunky guy who owns a cafe (Jude Law), sets off on a journey to nowhere specific, randomly runs into interesting people on the way, and returns to New York to fall into the arms of the hunky guy who runs the cafe. At no stage is the desire powerful enough, or the obstacle to attaining that desire steep enough, for the viewer to care about what happens next.
The real tragedy is that so much good work is wasted because of this lack of purpose. There is a beautifully crafted sub-plot about an alcoholic cop. Natalie Portman is electric in a bit role as a roving gambler. The sound track is moody and hypnotic. The photography is completely stunning. Not enough; because film isn't about visual technique. It's about story-telling.
2 comments:
What you are talking about is conflict, and is true that conflict was for decades at the core of good script writing. But in late years stories without strong conflicts started to arise, and many movies about them are pretty good. I think this has to do with our present, where people are often having a hard time finding true motivations, are lost, and instead of conflict they find themselves living gray lives.
Many movies talk about that and do not follow the traditional conflict/climax/resolution script structure.
Just to name a few I remember now, there you have many of Lynch's work; Hate by M. Kassovitz, 1995; many of Kim Ki Duk's movies...
Best regards from Argentina.
The best example of a s straight story is Lynch's The Straight Story itself....The film turf has gone non-linear by taking a suave linear road now...And that's a good turn I consider...Filmdom is all about reality of illusion of reality and reality illusion. You can fuse both illusion and reality and go straight telling a simple story without making it morbid or making your viewers intrigued.
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