Long Day's Journey into Night

Bi Gan peaked into my subconscious and picked from my absolute favorite films, mixed them up, and sprinkled them into one of the most unique films I’ve ever seen.

This is a knockout. This is :asterisk_symbol::asterisk_symbol:it.:asterisk_symbol::asterisk_symbol:

You can really get all the Tarkovsky's influence.

A luminous esoteric puzzle

The film is the love child of Andrei Tarkovsky and Wong Kar-wai, garnished with a truly batshit insane salad-dressing made up of an unholy mixture of filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, Guy Maddin, and Leos Carax, playwrights Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, poet Paul Celan, painters Marc Chagall, Francis Bacon, and Jackson Pollack, and novelists Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Patrick Modiano; not exactly a compendium of the most accessible artists of all time. As unconcerned with formal conventionality as it is with narrative resolution, this is an art-house movie through and through, an esoteric puzzle made up of two distinct parts. Whilst the 2D first half is a measured, but reasonably conventional albeit non-linear noir, the second is composed of an unbroken 50-minute 3D shot that's as aesthetically audacious as it is narratively elliptical. The second feature from 30-year-old self-educated writer/director Bi Gan, Long Day's Journey is aggressively enigmatic. But if you can get past the absence of character arcs, the formal daring, the languorous pacing, and the resistance to anything approaching definitive conclusions, and go with the film on its own terms, you'll find a fascinatingly esoteric examination of the protean nature of memory, a film that in both form and content seems to belie its writer/director's youth and relative inexperience.

For my complete review, please visit: https://boxd.it/Wl64H

I was looking for a more linear plot and wasn't expecting a surrealist film. Stunning cinematography and lighting, however I could not immerse myself in the story.

A very strange. Chinese story. It is impossible to understand the logic of the story. It is better to get carried away.

It felt as though instead of making a film, they tried to make ART, not knowing that art cannot be made. First you make a film you love and then you hope the art magically appears when you've finished.