Full Moon in New York (Stanley Kwan, 1989)

Gaowa Siqin and Sylvia Chang in Full Moon in New York

Cast: Sylvia Chang, Maggie Cheung, Gaowa Siqin. Screenplay: Chiu Kang-Chen, Zhong Acheng. Cinematography: Bill Wong. Production design: Lei Pan. Film editing: Chow Cheung-Kan. Music: Chang Hung-Yi. 

Full Moon in New York is based on a concept: Show something about the Chinese diaspora through the lives of three young women in New York. And as far as the concept goes, it works. Stanley Kwan gives us three points of origin and three distinct societal roles: Lee Fung Jiao (Maggie Cheung) is a type-A businesswoman from Hong Kong who is having an affair with another woman; Wang Hsiung-Ping (Sylvia Chang) is an unmarried aspiring actress from Taiwan; and Zhaohong (Gaowa Siqin) is a newlywed homemaker from the Mainland. Despite their disparate backgrounds, they meet and become friends largely because they're all Chinese trying to make their way in an alien land and culture. The film is full of lively scenes in which each meets her own particular challenge and finds a way through it, and equally lively scenes in which their friendship blossoms over the way they met these challenges.  The three actresses are marvelous, but the supporting cast isn't always up to their standard. I speak no Chinese, so I can't judge the delivery of the Chinese actors, but I found the Americans in the cast sometimes inept and amateurish. There's also something off in the scene in which Wang auditions in English for the role of Lady Macbeth: She seems to be speaking a paraphrase of the sleepwalking scene instead of the actual lines from Shakespeare's play. The scene is really a setup for her to give the American casting director, who wants to know why she thinks a Chinese actress could play the role, a lesson in Chinese history. Still, Full Moon in New York is good enough to leave me wanting more of the stories of these women. It feels very much like the pilot for a TV series that never got made. 

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

Tang Wei and Huang Jue in Long Day's Journey Into Night

Cast: Huang Jue, Tang Wei, Sylvia Chang, Lee Hong-Chi, Chen Yongzhong, Luo Feiyang, Chloe Maayan, Tuan Chun-hao, Bi Yanmin, Xie Lixun, Qi Xi, Ming-Dao, Long Zezhi. Screenplay: Bi Gan. Cinematography: David Chizallet, Wang Dong Li, Wu Changhua. Production design: Liu Qiang. Film editing: Qin Yanan. Music: Hsu Chin-Yuan, Lim Giong.

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.