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

53/100

Remember the scene in the Good Place pilot when Michael shows Eleanor her new house, pointing out its ostensible best features? "As you can see, the interior has been decorated just as you like it, in the Icelandic Primitive style. Oh, oh—and of course, you love clowns, so..." That's exactly how I feel when other people wax rhapsodic about this film's final movement: an hour-long, ridiculously complex single shot that seems expressly designed to evoke awe at its technical achievement. "Oh, oh‚ and of course, you love 3-D, so..." To be fair, the sculptural uncanny-valley effect that 3-D creates does feel apposite here, even if I still dislike actually watching it; the protagonist donning his own polarized glasses clearly signifies a break from reality, so the dim lighting and weird approximation of parallax just reinforce what's meant to be an oneiric odyssey. But my dreams aren't self-consciously elaborate one-ers (man, even the terminology for looka-me cinema makes we wince), and the absence of cuts, as always, proved more of a distraction than anything else. About 15-20 minutes into the shot, what happens next (per the dialogue) depends upon whether or not someone at a pool table sinks the ball into the corner pocket, and suddenly I'm not watching the movie anymore—I'm wondering whether Bi hired a professional pool player for the role (even though it's a fairly easy shot—the pool shot, I mean, not the shot that we're 15-20 minutes into, which is insanely difficult), or whether he had a contingency plan in case the actor whiffed, or whether he really would have yelled "Cut!" and driven back to the first location and started over (which apparently did happen several times). Those are not questions that any viewer should be entertaining in the moment. They only arise because moving the camera all over creation without cutting makes you (or me, anyway) more conscious of the people behind the camera than the people in front of it. (Most amusing example here is the brief, otherwise pointless pause that occurs while the camera operator is waiting for the next lift chair, or whatever those are called in a non-skiing context. Hum-de-dum-de-dum... Okay, here we go.) Anyway, yeah, still hate these stunts, wish they'd go away. 

That whole rant notwithstanding, Long Day's Journey Into Night had already kinda lost me by the time its "bravura" section kicked off, in part because the movie is really wall-to-wall "bravura." That can work for me in certain contexts—I'm still impatiently awaiting Lee Myung-se's next film (despite hating his last one)—but I've always had trouble with e.g. Hou Hsiao-hsien's approach, which combines ostentatiously gorgeous imagery with a narrative that's just elliptical/skeletal enough to make me constantly unsure whether or not I'm supposed to be deeply confused. Bi seems similarly dedicated to stunning opacity. Two days later, I vividly recall a bunch of specific shots (e.g. Huo slowly driving alongside Wan in the tunnel, her upper body visible through his window as shot through the passenger-side window ) but would be hard-pressed to tell you anything concrete about who our hero was searching for, or why, or what he ultimately discovered, or didn't. All of that comes across as deliberately vague pretext for a bunch of visual ideas that Bi wants to explore. It's especially frustrating to see Tang Wei, who fairly ignited the screen in Lust, Caution, embody generic disaffection, as if Bi were worried that the actors might upstage his slowly drifting camera. Often dazzling to look at, but I never got the emotional purchase that I wanted from that dazzle alone. 

In short: Those aren't my memories, I wasn't a lawyer, I never went to the Ukraine, I hate clowns—there's been a big mistake. I'm not supposed to be here.