The first English-language film by the great auteur Wong Kar Wai is a great disappointment, partly because of the stiff performance of his inexperienced lead actress (Grammy-winning singer Norah Jones in her acting debut), and partly because it looks like a rehash of his previous films Chungking Express and Fallen Angels.

Norah Jones plays a lonely young woman in America who hopes to save enough money to buy a car. She works as a waitress at several diners in Memphis, Nevada and Venice Beach, where she witnesses the follies of humanity, including those of a lovelorn policeman (David Straitharn), his beautiful ex-wife (Rachel Weitz), a jaded gambler (Natalie Portman), and others. Secretly, she pines for a pie-maker (Jude Law) who also has feelings for her.

As always, Wong explores the world of lonely individuals with unfulfilled longings. And as always, he relies on a supersaturated colour palette that makes his images throb like neon lights. Unfortunately, for those of us who have seen all his films since Days of Being Wild, My Blueberry Nights just seems too similar to the films he made more than a decade ago.

Throughout the movie, one can't help but make comparisons to the characters from his films in the 90s: Norah Jones seems to be playing the lonely waitress that Faye Wong played in Chungking Express. (And they're both singers too.) David Straitharn is playing the reticent policeman that Tony Leung immortalized. Jude Law is a substitute for Takeshi Kaneshiro, while Rachel Weitz is the femme fatale ala Lin Ching-hsia.

Wong seems to think that he can transplant the urban loneliness of Hong Kong to the streets of New York, Memphis, Nevada and Venice Beach. But the startling neon-lit visual style that evokes Hong Kong so well simply jars with some of the locations here, and doesn't quite blend with the American experience as some of us — who have lived or travelled extensively in America — know it.