Critics reviews

Bi Gan is arguably the strongest talent to emerge in Chinese (or even international) cinema over the past decade.

An incursion into form, Long Day’s Journey into Night reveals the trick of 3D. Instead of a continuous, pseudo-immersive experience that starts at the beginning, here 3D infiltrates more than halfway through the film’s nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time. When it finally enters, Bi reemphasizes its alleged immersiveness, 3D’s main selling point, by having this last, hour-long section comprise one continuous take.

[Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Twilight City] were the two most revelatory big-screen viewing experiences I've had over the past year, and while the emerging title is a stylish, twilit slow-cinema drama and the repertory title a radical (in both politics and form) essay film, I feel they'd pair extremely well.

There is some satisfaction that comes in seeing motifs and symbols established within the first part of Long Day’s Journey Into Night—apples, wild pomelos, ping-pong paddles—as they re-emerge in the galvanizing high-wire act performance of the second, though I’m unconvinced that the seeding of these symmetries can entirely justify the moribund experience of what has preceded.

Bi is a talent capable of whipping up a heady brew of heartache and haunted interiority, taking the notion of an unreliable narrator into the realm of exhilarating dream logic.

If the first half of Long Day's Journey seems to depict one kind of dream state—defined by constant slippage, the ground shifting beneath one's feet—the second simulates another, a lucid dream, the embodiment of a free-floating consciousness.

It’s across these points—in the midst of its post-converted long take—that I became most won over by Long Day’s journey to the stars, precisely because it delivers, however incidentally, one of recent cinema’s most damning demonstrations of how technology is cosmically incapable of saving us.

As a filmmaker in this year’s selection, Bi stands out for foregrounding memory over reality, or, in the second half, combining them, in a manner that alludes to the classics of both Western and East Asian cinema, but shows no anxiety of influence. We should all praise Bi Gan for being Bi Gan, and if there were only more Bi Gan floating around in the ether of the cinema world, it would be a more imaginative place.

The gimmick of stereoscopy adds little to the visual experience, and, more broadly, the undeniable visual bravura of Long Day’s Journey into the Night, with its lurid palette and the confidence of its swooping camera movements, struggles to compensate for the film’s narrative obscurity, and signals a certain proclivity in the young director for stylish surface effect over any potential depth of meaning.

Bi is unafraid to show his influences—there are traces here of Wong Kar-wai, Andrei Tarkovsky, and David Lynch. . . . In a landscape where staid realism dominates, Bi's attempts to refine the filmic vocabulary of dreams and memories are truly exciting, as is his apparent conviction that whole new realms of cinema are possible in making the immaterial material.

The poetic redundancy produced as a result might seem strident, even pretentious if it weren’t such a canny way of depicting how dreams themselves work: sets of unconscious ideas incapable of being fully grasped regardless of how often they are articulated.

Plunging viewers into an extended dream sequence in the name of abstract motifs such as memory, time, and space, the film is a lush plotless mood-piece swimming in artsy references and ostentatious technical exercises, with a star (Tang Wei, “Lust, Caution”) as decoration.