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| Tang Wei and Huang Jue in Long Day's Journey Into Night |
Bi Gan's second feature feels to me like the work of a young director whose debut feature, Kaili Blues (2015), may have gotten more praise than was good for him. It has the first film's relative indifference to conventional narrative and tendency to dazzle with cinematic technique, namely impossibly long traveling takes. In Kaili Blues, there was a breathtaking one-shot sequence that lasted 41 minutes, so almost inevitably Long Day's Journey Into Night has to extend its climactic take to almost an hour. I'm not saying that the second film is a failure -- it may one day be certified as a masterpiece -- but that Bi is in danger of becoming a mannerist filmmaker, one who lets his infatuation with the possibilities of his medium betray him into excess, to a preoccupation with form and style that fails to serve the imaginative potential of film. Long Day's Journey had the critics counting allusions, from the film noir setup to the apparent hommages to any number of other directors, not to mention his tribute to his literary heroes, evoking Eugene O'Neill in the English title of his film, and Roberto Bolaño in the Chinese title, which translates to an equivalent of Bolaño's Last Evenings on Earth. More than one critic has added Kafka and Borges to the source list, and I will add another: Bi's exploration through memories and dreams of Kaili, in southwestern China, reminds me of Faulkner's treatment of the North Mississippi past. And yet, Bi is his own auteur, one whose next film is bound to be met with eager anticipation by many. He just bears the burden of doing something new next time.
