Review: Long Day's Journey Into Night

Image courtesy of Kino Lorber.

Bi Gan's haunting, dreamlike "Long Day's Journey Into Night" - which has nothing to do with the Eugene O'Neill play - is an enigma wrapped in a puzzle, as the saying goes. There's no other film you'll likely see this year that's quite like it.

The film's first half is a visually lush and languid mystery, of sorts, in which a man named Luo Hongwu, (Jue Huang) who describes himself as a detective, searches for a woman he once knew who has apparently gone missing. In its dazzling second half - which was shot in 3D - he descends into a strange underworld that acts as a cinematic representation of a dream. The film has one of the most thought provoking and enticing final shots of recent years.

For those unfamiliar with Gan's previous film, "Kaili Blues," his work tends to involve slow moving, but hypnotic, mysteries - albeit ones of the soul more so than the flesh - that are set in the Chinese Southeast mainland city of Kaili. Both films employ long takes - in his previous picture, there was a lengthy motorcycle ride composed of one shot. In his latest, the film's final hour is one long continuous take that is guaranteed to take one's breath away, especially when considering all of the choreography that went into it.

Near the film's beginning, Luo asks how one can know whether one is in a dream or real life. He notes that his body is made of hydrogen, but his dreams are made of stone, and during the course of the film we see how those memories weigh him down. There are several scenes in movie theaters - most notably, one in which Luo puts on a pair of 3D glasses, transitioning the film to that format in the film's second half and launching into its hour-long dream state - and at one point Luo notes that films are always fake, but memories are a combination of truth and lies, including the ones we tell ourselves.

The film's plot is purposefully murky. It involves Luo attempting to discover who murdered a friend of his named Wildcat, which leads him to meet the mysterious Qiwen Wan (Tang Wei), a beautiful woman with whom he becomes entranced. They share some moments together before she disappears and he doesn't see her again. Nearly 20 years later, he has returned to his hometown for his father's funeral, and takes up the search for Qiwen.

Luo's mother, who owned a restaurant, tells her son to remove a broken clock that has long collected dust on the eatery's walls. Much later in the film, Luo gives a watch that has stopped to a woman whom he believes might be Qiwen. In "Long Day's Journey Into Night," time is an abstract construct and, much like the clock and watch, time has stopped for Luo, who attempts to reclaim a past that may no longer exist.

After the dreamscape kicks in during the film's final hour, Luo meets a number of characters after passing through a portal-like entry to the underworld - including a young boy who challenges him to a game of ping pong before giving him passage, a group of youths at a pool hall, an older couple who are bickering with each other and the woman whom Luo believes might be Qiwen.

The film's hour-long shot is an amazing technical accomplishment. The camera follows Luo as he traverses the underworld, but also stops to speak to various characters, takes a motorcycle ride, gets involved in a pool game, rides a harness down a mountainside and even flies above the city. The camera follows every move in a feat of incredible choreography. Even one minor misstep would likely have forced Gan and company to start the shot all over again.

The picture ends on a beguiling, mysterious image that speaks to the fleeting nature of all of life's beautiful things. In "Long Day's Journey Into Night," all of its characters are searching for one thing - in Luo's case, the girl who got away - that they consider essential, but are missing. This is a visually stunning and hypnotically engrossing movie. Rather than trying to follow the film's opaque narrative, I'd recommend allowing its moody visuals and soundtrack to wash over you and feeling your own way through the story. Everyone experiences a piece of art differently, and I'd imagine that this film will elicit a variety of reactions. My own is that "Long Day's Journey Into Night" is one of the most unique and transfixing movies I've seen this year.