Movie: Long Day's Journey Into Night

I have watched a lot of movies, including a lot of art movies in my life. I say this because after watching Bi Gan's movie Long Day's Journey Into Night I just did not get it. I watched carefully for the full 138 minutes and felt, not quite bored, but not fully emotionally engaged, either. Maybe it was because I was not able to see the film in 3-D on my television. Maybe it was because I do not understand enough about China. But the movie just left me cold.

The story of the movie is a fairly simple one, at least in my opinion. A drifter returns to his hometown, Kaili, in search of a woman he knew twenty years ago. He enters a movie theater and finds himself entering both a dream and a former women's prison. At least I think that is what happens. The part about the prison was a little murky to me.

The dialogue and voice over occasionally reminds the viewer that this story may be a dream with lines along the lines of "unlike memories, movies always contain mistakes." (I was unable to find the exact quote.) There are frequent scenes of puddles, rain, tears and many other forms of water to remind the viewer of, perhaps, the idea that these are doorways into the mind.

The movie is strangely atemporal. There are clocks and watches, but they are old and analog. The televisions look like they were made in 1985; there are no flat screens. There are no computers and no cell phones. There are absolutely no hints of anything resembling the Internet.

The film is set in a small industrial Chinese city. I think the American equivalent might be more like Youngstown, Ohio rather than Detroit, Michigan or Buffalo, New York. The first half of the movie features train tracks, large unused machines, and lots of rust. The streets are mostly empty and crowds are never seen. I do not know that there is an industrial city in China where you could find so few people. I suppose this is also part of the dream.

At about the halfway point of the movie a title card shows the name of the movie and, from that point on, the rest of the movie is an unbroken tracking shot. This, I suppose, suggests a dream. For me, I did not see as much of a difference between the first half of the movie and the second half. It seemed a rather pale and dark dream to me; this is not the dramatic land of Oz that was so much brighter and more interesting than Kansas. The still below is about as bright as the lighting gets in the second half of the movie.

If you look around the web you can find glowing reviews of Bi Gan's movie.  For instance, Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times writes:

The glory of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a full-body swoon of a movie from the 28-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan, is an ingenious, nearly hour-long sequence that was shot in an unbroken take and then converted to 3-D in post-production. It constitutes the second act and the emotional centerpiece of this moody, mind-bending romantic noir, and it ranks among the great poetic and technical achievements in recent cinema.

Glen Kenny in the New York Times has this to say:

Not since David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” has a filmmaker in such proximity to what we can call the independent mainstream undertaken quite as radical a challenge to linear narrative. And the achievement is all the more awe-inspiring given that the movie’s second half, a 3-D film-within-a-film (of sorts; it could just be Luo’s dream of one) is contained within what seems to be a single continuous shot of nearly an hour in length. What could be more linear than that? And yet its various components defy logical arrangement both as viewed and in retrospect. What they build up to is even more seductive than anything that led up to it — a moment of breathtaking romanticism that’s as intoxicating as it is unexpected.