The Cinematheque

3D Presentation

“In every sense sensational … One of the most richly ambivalent films this century about cinema’s ontological relationship with time, space, memory, and dreaming.”

Blake Williams, Cinema Scope

Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night counts as his most impressive (and notorious) success. An intentionally misleading marketing campaign in China positioned the film as a conventional New Year’s Eve romance, and while it doesn’t deliver that kind of genre satisfaction, the film is full of jaw-dropping, dreamily fragmented versions of lovers’ games: poems said to possess a mysterious power; excursions into table tennis, billiards, and karaoke; and a one-hour long take entirely in 3D that toys with our expectation of a couple’s reunion. Luo (Huang Jue) is on the murky trail of a woman, a friend, or a ghost. Wan (Tang Wei) is involved in the plot, and so is the mother (Sylvia Chang) of Luo’s gangster friend Wildcat. A noirish voiceover provides exposition, while Bi’s time-fracturing approach ensures that we remain one step behind the truth (not to mention the present). The fluid camerawork of the second half follows the first’s enigmatic cutting; both encourage rapt attention.

In Mandarin with English subtitles

“[After] An Elephant Sitting Still, Bi Gan’s film emerged; don’t these films serve as two flaming torches in the heart of the night? … A medieval poetry, gritty and rough like that of Villon and Chassignet, later scattered through the works of Verlaine, Carco, and de La Vaissière.”

Pierre Rissient