The 60th edition of the Cannes film festival opens tonight with an epic by one of the great romantics of art house cinema. Wong Kar Wai’s visually arresting journey across America is propelled by the stories of loners half-crazed by love and grief.

A hunky café owner in New York has a jar on his counter where disgruntled and jilted locals deposit the keys to their flats after storming out of a relationship. Jude Law doesn’t have the heart to throw them away. His own is broken by one such unlucky stranger, Elizabeth (Norah Jones), who has recently dumped her partner and developed a liking for Law’s blueberry pies. But on a sudden whim she sets off across the States sending postcards back to Law from the diners and bars where she finds work.

The film charts this haphazard emotional pilgrimage with decidedly mixed results. Wong’s first English language film reveals what a superb artist he is. Visually his film looks stunning on a giant festival screen, but the links between characters and stories require large leaps of faith.

In a bar in Memphis, Elizabeth feeds David Strathairn’s lonely cop a diet of pure whisky. His marriage has crumbled into a bitter obsession with his estranged and adulterous wife (Rachel Weisz). Strathairn doesn’t know whether to absolve her or a put a bullet in her back. Given Wesiz’s tearstained hysteria it seems entirely obvious that he should do the latter.

Another temp job in a casino brings Elizabeth into contact with Natalie Portman’s foxy hard-as-nails gambler, who borrows all her money and then promptly loses it on the turn of a card. Their subsequent road trip in Portman’s spanking new Jaguar – which she hands over to the waitress as recompense – is the most enjoyable leg of this slightly indulgent movie.

But it’s so beautifully painted that you can forgive Wong any number of sins. The close-up chemistry between Norah Jones’s feckless heroine and Law’s Mancunian café proprietor is electric. In her first role as an actress, the singer is a genuine find: artless and affecting. The scenes between Jones and Law have all the wonderful hallmarks of Wong’s masterpiece, In the Mood for Love.

Where the director scores heavily is the way he handles atmosphere and themes. He experiments quite brilliantly with shutter speeds, angles, filters, and textures. The lettering on the windows of the café and scrawled on Elizabeth’s postcards takes on a sort of mysterious life of its own. The landscape photography is breath-taking, as are the iconic shots of street corners and open roads which you could cut out and hang in galleries.

Like all metaphorical journeys, this one comes full circle but there’s a wonderful ambiguity about how it actually ends. Laurence Block’s patchy screenplay is a little too fond of poetical lines and coincidences. It’s designed to chime with Wong’s visual artistry but it falls disappointingly short at crucial moments. Entire scenes are sabotaged by whimsy.

Nevertheless this is a seriously pleasing way to start the race for the Palme d’Or, and hopefully an omen for even better things to come.

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