You can be sure organizers of the Cannes Film Festival had knotted stomachs ahead of Wednesday night's scheduled screening of Wong Kar-wai's "My Blueberry Nights." WKW films are always born in chaos, and he's delivered a few wet prints to Cannes in the past: "In The Mood For Love," which won two prizes in 2000, was still being subtitled the morning of the screening, while 2004's "2046" arrived a full day late.

Despite this, they keep inviting Wong back, and it must be because his films are so damn good. Since "Chungking Express" became an underground hit worldwide in 1994, Wong's reputation has grown with each new film, peaking perhaps with his Best Director prize at Cannes in 1997 for "Happy Toge- ther" (which did what "Brokeback Mountain" was acclaimed for — portraying mainstream actors playing gay lovers — almost a decade earlier).

Wong is viewed as an auteur in Europe — a director with an impressionistic approach to themes of time and memory, longing and loss. In Asia, he's seen as the epitome of cool. Look at all those beautiful people — Tony Leung, Michelle Reis, Maggie Cheung, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Brigitte Lin — shot in rapturous compositions of melancholic moodiness by super-original cinemato- grapher Chris Doyle. Many directors have since aped Wong's style (see Shunji Iwai) but without picking up on his soul.