A Long Day's Journey into Night is Chinese director Bi Gan's second feature film, completed in 2018 and shown at the Walker Art Center in early May 2019. The film is about two-hours and ten minutes long and exceedingly difficult. I don't pretend to understand the film and can't accurately summarize it's progress -- the film has a dream-like plot that can't really be paraphrased. In my estimation, the picture develops pictorial themes and techniques that Bi Gan demonstrated in his remarkable first picture, Kaili Blues -- and the film is set in Kaili, an apparently remote coal-mining and river town in something like theAppalachia of mainland China. The film's milieu is similar to that shown in Kaili Blues -- we seem to be dealing with alienated ex-convicts, shiftless young people, and sinister gangsters. Kaili Blues is a far superior film in my view because it has a form that remains tethered to some extent in the real world and recognizably human characters. A Long Day's Journey into Night (the title is perverse and the film has no connection whatsoever to Eugene O'Neil's play) is most similar to David Lynch's almost unwatchably strange and tedious Inland Empire. Lynch used the techniques and horror-film imagery in his experimental Inland Empire as a springboard to create the ineffably bizarre and fascinating Twin Peaks reboot. I think Lynch's series will be one of the decisive works of art in the 21st century and, surely, the program is one of history's great films. Therefore, I am confident that Bi Gan, who is very young (probably about 32) will make remarkable films in the future. Long Day's Journey... is dull and completely confusing, but it is a unique experience and, I think, a harbinger of great work to come.
Like Kaili Blues, A Long Days Journey... is constructed in two roughly equal parts. The first hour involves a protagonist who comes to Kaili to investigate his father's death. (I think the man's called Lo Hong Wu -- if I can trust notes scribbled on the back of a brochure in the supernal darkness of the WAC theater; I'll call him Wu for short -- although he really functions as an unnamed, inexplicable presence in the film, a center around which the film's dreamlike action revolves.) Wu's father, a petty gangster named Wildcat, has been found in a mineshaft, apparently murdered. Initially, the film resembles a strangulated version of a film noir mystery -- Wu encounters a femme fatale who seems to have been implicated in his father's murder. (The movie uses genre elements much like Bela Tarr's equally unsuccessful The Man from London adapted from a crime novel by Georges Simenon -- you sense the mystery movie components cubistically fractured and sort of randomly distributed throughout a picture that really has nothing to so with the genre that it invokes.) The femme fatale seems to have had an affair with Wildcat. It's not clear to me but she may have used Wildcat to kill her husband, the keeper of a disastrously decrepit hotel, the Pangmei Inn, a ghostly place where water drips and a big black German shepherd (as in Tarkovsky's Stalker) paces around uneasily. The woman (or there may be two women or even more) was like Scheherazade: when she ran out of money she earned her keep telling the hotel owner stories until he married her. She entices someone (probably Wildcat) to kill the hotel owner and, then, she (perhaps) has someone kill Wildcat and dump him in a mine-shaft. Wu has a "green book" that (perhaps) tells the story of two doomed lovers. The two doomed lovers may be Wildcat and the femme fatale or, possibly, the femme fatale and the doomed Pangmei Hotel innkeeper. (A female convict tells Wu that she and the femme fatale robbed a house and stole the "green book.") The lovers meet for trysts in an abandoned and flooded house where water is pouring down from the ceiling incessantly. Sometimes, Wu and the femme fatale have encounters in a greenish, gloomy tunnel. In one scene, we see someone flailing around in a car -- it's either a sex scene or a murder: we can't tell which because the vehicle is passing through a car-washer and covered with froth and soap -foam. People go on train rides in deserted cars. Wu claims to have seen his dead father's ghost on the train -- we don't see anything. Rain is predicted -- more rain since it is wet in every single scene in the entire film. There are mudslides. Sometimes, when someone is talking we hear an ominous low rumble of a mud slide, but we never see one. The incessant rain, mirror effects using specular surfaces that are corroded or covered with condensate, dark dripping corridors, detritus under the surface of turbid, polluted water, and a shot taken directly from Stalker (a train rumbles by causing a glass of liquid to inch it's way off the edge of a dirty table) all invoke Tarkovsky. But, other aspects of the film come directly from David Lynch's movies. There's a torture scene in which a nattily dressed gangster sings karaoke to a man suspended from an overhead pipe -- this is like Dean Stockwell singing the Sandman song in Blue Velvet. (Who is being tortured and why I couldn't decipher.) A Long Day's Journey... is the darkest picture I have ever seen -- the viewer literally can't decipher what is happening in half the shots. This is clearly intentional since Bi Gan showed himself a master of clearly lit and expository landscapes and city locations in Kaili Blues -- the director doesn't want you to be able to see what is happening. And this for the entire two-hour and ten minutes film.
After about one hour, the hero staggers into a bombed-out looking courtyard where some flames are flickering in barrels. People who like zombies are scattered around. Wu is looking for the femme fatale who appears and disappears mysteriously throughout the movie. A woman (who looks just like the mystery lady) tells Wu that the femme fatale will be singing "just before dawn" in a dive dimly lit at the other end of the courtyard. (And, then, joint will be demolished.) The hero goes to a movie theater to kill time. The film that he is watching is a 3D movie and, when he dons his dark glasses, this is a sign to the audience to put on the 3D goggles that viewers were handed at the door when they entered the auditorium. The movie projected on the screen is called A Long Day's Journey into Night -- the title appears one hour into the film. The rest of the movie consists of a continuous gargantuan sequence shot, seemingly without cuts (I think Bi Gan cheats a couple time but it's so dark you can't tell). This movie within a movie involves Wu finding himself in a dungeon-like room. He meets a boy wearing a minotaur's skull and plays him in a Ping-Pong game. The boy takes Wu to the edge of a huge amphitheater-like declivity and puts him in a sort of miner's bucket. The bucket then descends several hundred feet to place where various shadowy figures are moving about. It's a Karaoke contest and the woman Wu is seeking is supposed to appear last, just as the sun is rising at dawn. (We hear roosters crowing continuously during this last hour.) Wu plays pool with a woman who looks like the femme fatale. She is older however and she ushers Wu deeper into the huge cavity -- it's like a hell with concentric circles each deeper than the last. The woman takes Wu to where a man is confined in a cage. The woman says that this is her lover. They quarrel. Wu opens the cage and the older woman and man depart in a white pickup truck -- I have the sense that the man is Wildcat. Before they leave, the woman says that she and the man in the cage enjoyed many romantic trysts at a palace-house where the roof leaked. Wu goes back to the Karaoke contest. He encounters the mysterious woman in the dressing room. He gives her a watch, plucked from the cage where Wildcat was trapped -- "it's a symbol of eternity" he tells her. She lights a Roman candle and inserts it in a flower vase in her dressing room -- "It's a symbol of evanescence," she says. Then, she and Wu use a magic Ping-Pong paddle (I kid you not) to fly over the ramshackle brick compound in the hell-amphitheater to the palatial house where the lovers once met. But it's all burned out, just a ruined hull. The mysterious woman vanishes. Wu climbs out of the lower parts of this hell to where the Karaoke show is underway. There's some robotically performed songs ala Blue Velvet and, then, Wu goes back into the dressing room -- the camera focuses on the Roman Candle still flickering and casting sparks and, then, the film ends. The last 59 minutes can be explained, more or less, as a sequence of events but I don't have a clear concept what it means or why these things occur -- clearly, the movie within the movie, possibly Wu's dream, incorporates elements from the previous hour of the film. For instance, the femme fatale has asked Wu to get her a pomelo fruit. But it's winter and there are no pomelos to be found. In one of the amphitheaters in the black subterranean hell, a horse suddenly emerges, materializing out of awall -- the horse is carrying a load of fruit including pomelo. Wildcat's death has something to do with apples -- Wildcat was working as a street vendor of apples and his inventory rotted when he vanished. In the final hour, the hero seems to be continuously chomping on an apple. These correlations are obvious-- the apple seems to suggest Eve's temptation of Adam and connects to the femme fatale's role in triggering the murder of the Innkeeper and Wildcat. But other aspects of the hour-long final sequence are hard to interpret and, perhaps, can't be interpreted at all. Furthermore, if the film was dark before the last hour, it is impenetrably gloomy after the audience dons the heavily tinted 3D goggles -- several times, I lifted the goggles, which really did little but blur and darken the image, and found that the screen was much clearer and better lit without the glasses. But you are supposed to wear the glasses and some parts of the last sequence did feature very low-key and unimpressive 3D effects. The last hour is so dark that I often couldn't tell what I was seeing. (This final hour-long nightmare sequence is similar to the last ninety minutes of Inland Empire in which Laura Dern enters a black maze and literally melts away, sometimes turning into a doppelganger or a haze of electrons and encountering other monstrous apparitions -- she can't get back to the well-lit audition where the sequence began and the film ends with her trapped forever in Lynch's hellish fun-house.)
Ban Gi's movie is a failure and close to unwatchable. But it takes huge chances. The wager, which doesn't pay off, is enormous.
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