Mark Reviews Movies: LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 9, 2019

It is widely accepted that discussing a dream is one of the best non-starters for conversation. Thankfully, writer/director Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey Into Night (which has nothing to do with the Eugene O'Neill play) doesn't begin with a dream. It does end with one, shown in an impressive, nearly one-hour one-take of unbelievable staging and choreography. Even before then, the story, which unfolds through a series of half-recalled memories, possesses a similar approach of dream logic.

The resulting movie is at times hypnotic, as a man sets out to find a woman whom he can't forget, but mostly an act of evasion. Bi's screenplay reveals only enough that we can gather the basic thrust of the past relationship between Hongwu (Huang Jue), a blank slate of a protagonist, and Qiwen (Tang Wei), a green dress-wearing enigma of that constant male-fantasy archetype: the seemingly strong but actually vulnerable and likely manipulative woman in need of rescue.

Qiwen literally exists as an object here, since Hongwu admits in ever-present narration that he might not actually remember her or the events of their relationship with any accuracy. The story has him returning to his hometown of Kaili, where years ago he met and, if his memory is right, basically stalked Qiwen from the train on which they were both passengers.

Despite the fact that she's dating a violent mob boss, the two ended up having an affair, with regular rendezvous in an abandoned house. The rain leaked and continues to leak through the roof, as if the house itself is sobbing over the inevitable tragedy of what's to come and what has passed.

Bi's command of such hauntingly romantic and just downright haunting imagery here almost helps us to ignore the scattered narrative, which jumps between the past and present without revealing much beyond the fact of Hongwu's search, and the one-dimensional characters. As a mood piece, the movie is mostly successful, but by the time that climactic dream sequence arrives, it's clear that Bi's screenplay wants us to have taken more from this tale.

As impressive as that final extended shot is, it doesn't actually resolve anything. That, perhaps, is the point of Long Day's Journey Into Night—that some questions can only be answered by fantasy. If we had a reason to care about these characters and their relationship, such a statement might have made an impact.

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