Thursday, May 09, 2019

Long Day's Journey Into Night (Bi Gan, 2018)

Bi Gan is a very talented young man. This - which shares a number of themes and tricks with his debut, Kaili Blues, but arrives somewhere distinctively different - starts off a little bit like Wong Kar-wai meets Tarkovsky. Sumptuously colour-coded cinematography, an intricate weave of present and past, the ghost of a film noir plot. All very well executed and with a lot to recommend it, but we've seen similar things before. And then it descends into another world and really does generate something engrossingly magical, which restrospectively readjusts our sense of what preceded it. For once, I feel that spoilers really should be avoided, but suffice to say that the film ends up structured something like a Mulholland Dr. in reverse - except that the "dream" often makes much more sense than the "reality". It certainly calls attention to its own virtuosity, but in a way that feels entirely in keeping; some of that virtuosity is so extraordinary that it takes on a hallucinatory quality all of its own.

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