All I knew about the Chinese film, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018; the title is appropriated from Eugene O’Neill’s play but has nothing to do with it) was that it had an unbroken shot that went for like an hour (59 minutes to be precise; basically the second half of the movie) and that it had a heavy neo-noir vibe. Available to now stream on Stan in Australia, I took the plunge one Friday night and was pleasantly rewarded. We follow a man named Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) who returns to his hometown village Kalil (where the director Bi Gan is from) after the death of his father. This sets him off on a continuous reverie about the past, wafting around him like the cigarettes he constantly smokes, yearning for his past lover Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei from Lust/Caution and Blackhat), often visualised as a classic femme fatale in a green dress. There are plot details about a gangster with a penchant for a karaoke, a friend who got in too deep with gambling debts, and even his own absent mother with a possible criminal past. The movie doesn’t progress the story as much as luxuriates in the images and textures of dripping water, neon signs, dimly lit interiors, cinema theatres and eaten fruit, all of it weighed with symbolism. The director Bi Gan definitely worships at the altar of slow cinema masters like Andrei Tarkovsky while also attending to a more post-modern aesthetic that feels similar to Wong Kar-Wai. I was happy with the slow, reflective first half and would have been fine if it kept moving in that style. Yet there’s a clear halfway point where the movie shifts into another gear with its continuous shot, which was more complicated and mysterious than I expected (also originally shot for 3D viewing in cinemas – the only trace of that is slight jerky movements, which adds to the dreamlike feel of the shot). Motifs and symbols of the movie return and swirl around in a section that feels more about the present moment, in a dream-like fashion, than the ruminations of the past in the first half. All of this is the result of not one, but three cinematographers for this movie (Yao Hung-i, Dong Jinsong, and David Chizallet). Some will find this dull and pretentious. But if you have the patience and the inkling for such stylish wandering (and wondering), it is certainly an achievement. An absorbing noir romance epic. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 