Friday Night Flicks: A Long Day's Journey Into Night
Filtered through the dizzying lens of regret, Bi Gan’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night plays more like an interpretation of the director’s dream journal than an actual film - sublime at times, harrowing at others.
Through an excruciatingly non-linear succession of flashbacks and experimental, arthouse type cinematography, the film spends its first hour grappling with its own mystery. There’s a lot of dot-connecting to do on the viewer’s end, and the protagonist’s vague, disconcerted voiceovers only add to the film’s overall liminality. It took me about thirty minutes to figure out this film was even about. It’s that kind of watch.
“The difference between a movie and a memory is that movies are always false. In a movie, one scene follows another. But memories mix truth and lies. They vanish before our eyes.”
Eventually, the storyline gets its act together. You come to realize that the first half is really just a preamble for the second, which - if you’re a fan of dream sequences - is a massive payoff. This is where the heart of the story lies; the plot is unified through a single, uninterrupted hour-long take wherein the protagonist embarks on two separate journeys at once in search of a former lover: his descent into the ruins of a remote Chinese funhouse mirrors his simultaneous descent into the maze-like ruins of his own memory.
Here, the thin veil separating the past and present obscures itself. The narrative continues to move forward in time, but time itself becomes a fluid, ambiguous thing, as capable of expanding outwards as it is capable of collapsing in itself. Only you, the viewer, are anchored at a single point. The rest is chaos. —Jackson Todd
