It’s almost as if the point is to compel the viewer to ask, “Am I missing something?” You are - and you aren’t. However, Bi Gan’s film elides actual plot elements far more than it articulates them. If that’s not an invitation to a dark, fatalistic journey, I don’t know what is. “I might never have gone back to Kaili had my father not died,” Luo says in voice-over early in the film. There’s a mysterious woman in a green dress (Tang Wei, of “Lust, Caution”) who frequently asks for a light for her cigarettes. There’s a photo with a phone number on the back, hidden behind the back plate of a wall clock. The narrative that engulfs the movie’s male protagonist Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) is replete with elements of film noir. This is not just because of the imagery, which, in the first half, is heavy with depictions of water - raining on windshields and inside musty rooms, rippling in puddles, trickling in a tear down a character’s cheek. Very often, and particularly in its second half, watching it feels like dreaming with your eyes open. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” the second feature by the Chinese director Bi Gan (whose 2016 debut “ Kaili Blues” made an impression in art houses the world over), would make exemplary late-night communal viewing. Midnight movies are no longer the attraction they were back in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |