Jason Adams reporting from the New York Film Festival
Late in the film version of Six Degrees of Separation Stockard Channing's character, at her wit's end, says, "I will not turn him into an anecdote, it was an experience; how do we hold onto the experience?" That's how I feel about writing up my thoughts on Bi Gan's dream-adjacent Long Day's Journey Into Night. It was an experience. An out of body one, sorta. How do I turn that experience into words?
Luo (Huang Jute, whose handsome face we come to know from every angle) is haunted by what else, a lost woman (played by Lust Caution's Tang Wei, for a time anyway), and he wanders the damp earth and the the even damper underworld and everywhere damp in between trying to find her - trying to hold on to fractions of dreams and memories; who can tell which is which here? It's all fractured - time, space, sound...
It might be wise at this juncture to picture Luo's head as a planet. An unto-itself isolated landscape floating in space. Think of Google Earth if that helps. And this film is a travelogue mapping us over the space. We climb into the caverns of his ears and rustle through his brain, we float softly astride his craggy cheeks, digging in picks and analyzing what crystals come up - it's an odd way of going about figuring somebody out, but a one of a kind one nonetheless. There's a real first-person video-game feel to it - especially in the film's technically astonishing 3D second half. It's the furthest outside of myself, metaphysically speaking, that I've felt in a movie theater since David Lynch's Inland Empire.
Yes you might be bored at times. I was. But there's something to be said for experiencing a little boredom while watching a film, in the right hands anyway - that's a lesson I have to keep re-learning. When your mind wanders and you start mixing up your own meandering thoughts with the images on-screen - when you and the languorous cinematic experience become commingled. It can be, even if for just a kernel of a moment, transcendent. I wouldn't trust every film-maker with that tool - some movies are just flat out boring, full stop - but some folks know how to work it, and Bi Gan seems to be one of them. I transcended.
Long Day's Journey into Night screens at NYFF on October 2nd and 4th.