Downtown West Offers Rare Screening of Surreal Chinese Noir ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’

There are a lot of titles vying for your attention at the movies right now – many of them deserving. At just about every multiplex, there’s Olivia Wilde’s immediately beloved coming-of-age comedy Booksmart, as well as the third entry in the ever-consistent John Wick action franchise. And, of course, the superheroes are still in town in case you haven’t seen Avengers: Endgame enough times yet. At Knoxville’s art house theater, Regal Downtown West, there are also plenty of contenders, such as the comedic documentary Hail Satan? and the subversive Dickinson biopic Wild Nights With Emily. All of this is not even to mention new releases on streaming platforms or the constantly rotating slate of classics showing at Central Cinema. Both this week and most weeks, Knoxville is somewhat of a cornucopia for hungry movie fans who know where to look. Perhaps lost in the shuffle, however, is Long Day’s Journey into Night, a surreal and sensual noir film from the young Chinese director Bi Gan. This strange, challenging, and ultimately quite mesmerizing film premiered at the Cannes film festival last year to great interest, but has only shown on about two dozen screens throughout the US – Knoxville’s Downtown West being one of the select few.

Long Day’s Journey into Night is only Bi Gan’s second film, but he has already made a name for himself internationally as a remarkably ambitious filmmaker looking to push the medium into new technical and temporal spaces. Working within a “slow cinema” tradition that is usually characterized by stillness, Bi Gan’s camera is endlessly wandering in ways that make the film world feel both overwhelmingly huge and intimately familiar. His first film, Kaili Blues – which was screened by Knoxville’s Public Cinema back in 2016 – utilized small digital cameras to explore Bi Gan’s hometown of Kaili in real time, traversing enormous expanses of land and water by hopping on motorbikes and river boats over the course of one continuous shot lasting 40 minutes. Long Day’s Journey into Night is similar to Kaili Blues in concept, but raises the bar in its execution; the film is split into two 70-minute halves (dropping its title card, incidentally, only after the first 70 minutes have concluded), the second of which consists of a single unbroken shot originally captured in 3D. The 3D cut of the film, sadly, isn’t screening anywhere outside of New York and LA (thanks for hogging all those 3D projectors, Avengers!), but the shot is an odyssey worth taking in any number of dimensions available.

I don’t imagine many people are motivated to see films based on how difficult they were to make, but the hour-spanning final shot of Long Day’s Journey into Night is a logistical wonder, incorporating transport via moped and zip-line, multiple games of ping-pong and billiards, several karaoke performances, fireworks, live animal wrangling, and a swoon-worthy final moment involving the film’s central characters spinning on an unseen rotating platform. Given that list, one might expect this shot to be some sort of chaotic thrill—perhaps aligned with more traditional cinematic sensibilities about a great amount of movement making a film “action-packed”—but Bi Gan opts instead to give all these moving parts a slow, steady hand in order to create an experience that feels subtly immersive, dream-like, and, as the title suggests, nocturnal.

Although the physical movement of his characters is something that’s granted a great amount of clarity in both of his films’ second-halves, both Bi Gan’s movies have first-halves that are perhaps intentionally hard to follow on a basic plot level. The character identities are relationships are ambiguously drawn, and incidents are often described or remembered rather than seen directly. In the case of Long Day’s Journey into Night, there is at least a noir-ish genre conceit that carries the audience through the narrative: our protagonist is investigating the disappearance of a woman he once loved, aided only by a slightly burned photograph. Along the way, he meets a second woman who he feels bears an uncanny resemblance to the first, falling in love with her as well. The narrative will surely remind some of Hitchock’s classic Vertigo (which Knoxvillians had the valuable opportunity to see at the Tennessee Theater last summer), but the film also hits certain notes that feel reminiscent of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. The one thing that unites this diverse set of reference points is each film’s intense focus on sensory—and sensual!—experience. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, one’s senses are activated and heightened through the use of tight close-ups and inventive shot composition, often taking his camera on 360-degree turns, both horizontal and vertical. A sumptuous color palette featuring lots of jade greens and neon pinks adds to the experience. But, especially, it is the film’s music that somehow combines flamenco, lounge, pop, and drone into a playlist that perfectly captures a singular mood. Even when Bi Gan’s plotting is not always clear (and at least some obliqueness is surely intended, especially since the entire second half of the film is suggested to be a dream), the film creates a strong atmosphere that can carry you from scene to scene if you’re open to the idea of just feeling the film aesthetically rather than solely following it narratively.

Near the end of Long Day’s Journey into Night, two central characters give each other gifts: one gives a watch, described as a symbol of eternity, and the other gives a firework, described as a symbol of transience. In its two halves, the film embodies both ideas. The first half is characterized by stasis, the second by movement; the first half takes place in reality (in which something has been lost), while the second takes place in a dream (in which that something is remembered). And on this note of the transitory nature of life and experience, I’d like to mention: you might not have much time to see this! Long Day’s Journey into Night is available in Knoxville as a rare theatrical screening for at least a few more days, but considering how small and strange it is – as well as the great amount of cinematic competition it faces for your attention – it might not stick around much longer.