Long Day's Journey Into Night

Oozing atmosphere with its noirish neon glow, the film chronicles the return of Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) to Kaili, the hometown from which he fled many years before. Back for his father's funeral, Luo recalls the death of an old friend, Wildcat, and searches for lost love Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei), who continues to haunt him. Sculpting time and space through virtuosic technical feats, Bi's film yields successive visual and aural delights. With talismanic cues and motifs of uncanny doubling, the film is bisected - its first half recast in the second through a vertiginous, trance-inducing, hour-long single take in 3D. A hushed, hypnotic study of hazy memory, lost time, and flight - and featuring the formidable Sylvia Chang as Wildcat's mother - Long Day's Journey Into Night leads the viewer on a nocturnal, labyrinthine voyage, one that both reveals and conceals a world of passion and intrigue.

Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival (Un certain regard), Toronto International Film Festival, San Sebastian Film Festival 2018. International Film Festival Rotterdam 2019.

Original title Di qiu zui hou de ye wan

Length 133 min

Original language Mandarin

Countries  China, France

Cert 12A

Week Commencing 27th December Also available on Curzon Home Cinema

Week Commencing 3rd January  Also available on Curzon Home Cinema

Week Commencing 10th January Also available on Curzon Home Cinema

Week Commencing 17th January Also available on Curzon Home Cinema

Week Commencing 24th January Also available on Curzon Home Cinema

Week Commencing 31st January Also available on Curzon Home Cinema

Week Commencing 7th February Also available on Curzon Home Cinema

Week Commencing 14th February Also available on Curzon Home Cinema

Week Commencing 21st February Also available on Curzon Home Cinema

Week Commencing  28th February Also available on Curzon Home Cinema

Week Commencing 6th March Also available on Curzon Home Cinema

Born in Kaili in China in 1989, Bi Gan directed his first short, DIAMOND SUTRA, in 2012 which earned him the Special Mention award in the Asian New Force Category at the IFVA Festival in Hong Kong.

In 2015, Bi's debut feature film KAILI BLUES garnered the Best New Film Director at The 52nd Golden Horse Awards , The FIPRESCI Prize, The Golden Montgolfiere Prize at The 37th Festival of the Three Continents in Nantes, and the Best First Feature Film Award at The 68th Locarno Film Festival.

In 2017, Bi wrote and directed his 2nd feature film LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT which premiered at the Cannes film Festival 2018 in the Un Certain Regard section and has since then toured in many other international film festivals and since opened in the US to great acclaim.

Filmography

★★★★★

“There is such artistry and audacity in this new film from Bi Gan... this is being shown in both 3D and 2D versions, and it’s impressive either way – an exhilarating slo-mo hallucination."

Peter Bradshaw, THE GUARDIAN

★★★★★

‘If you enjoy the beauty in decay, the inherent romanticism of looking for someone beyond reach, and the dazzling movement of a psychologically motivated camera, then Long Day’s Journey into Night might be the movie you’ve been waiting for.

Fans of directors Alain Resnais, David Lynch, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Nicolas Roeg, and Wong Kar-wai will likely find this art-house stunner an enrapturing experience…… 

'A thing of beauty and daring…it suggests Bi will become one of the great directors of the coming decade.’

Graham Fuller, ARTSDESK

★★★★

"This maverick Chinese drama channels Wong Kar-wai and Tarkovsky into a trippy noir romance."

Trevor Johnston TIME OUT

★★★★

'That phrase “the magic of cinema” has been rather devalued in an age in which the wonders that we see in the movies are available to anyone… but Bi Gan’s transcendent memory trip of a movie, some kind of sorcery is at work.  It’s dazzling, baffling and staggeringly ambitious. A sensual experience, achieved through soaking each frame in floods of colour… it will dazzle and baffle long after the credits have rolled.

Wendy Ide, THE OBSERVER

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★★★★

"Forget the big brand space opera: here’s the season’s pre-eminent work of event cinema."

Tara Brady, THE IRISH TIMES

"Long Day’s Journey into Night is an all-enveloping experience that genuinely approaches the condition of hallucination: one steeped both in anxiety and in rapturous eroticism…

Yes, Long Day’s Journey into Night could easily be dismissed as mere poetry—but when it comes to poetry this imaginatively spellbinding, there’s no “mere” about it."

Jonathan Romney Film Comment

"Bi Gan’s time-bending noir ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ is a magical piece of filmmaking.

The glory of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a full-body swoon of a movie from the 28-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan, is an ingenious, nearly hour-long sequence that was shot in an unbroken take and then converted to 3-D in post-production. It constitutes the second act and the emotional centerpiece of this moody, mind-bending romantic noir, and it ranks among the great poetic and technical achievements in recent cinema.

The effect is one of sustained tension and wonderment, a state that compels both heightened attention and woozy surrender. For close to an hour, you watch as this metaphysical Rube Goldberg device plays out, as a succession of formal delights and narrative surprises are harmonized into a single, flowing movement that feels both utterly convincing and thrillingly irrational.

In one sublime feat of cinematic prestidigitation, Bi forges new possibilities by which movies can defy the constraints of logic and represent the unrepresentable. When he refuses to cut away, he isn’t just performing a stunt; he’s giving voice to an obsession. He wants the movie to go on forever. He isn’t alone."

Justin Chang The Los Angeles Times

"The achievement is all the more awe-inspiring given that the movie’s second half, a 3-D film-within-a-film (of sorts; it could just be Luo’s dream of one) is contained within what seems to be a single continuous shot of nearly an hour in length. What could be more linear than that? And yet its various components defy logical arrangement both as viewed and in retrospect. What they build up to is even more seductive than anything that led up to it — a moment of breathtaking romanticism that’s as intoxicating as it is unexpected."

Glenn Kenny The New York Times

"The unexpected love child of Wong Kar-wai and Andrei Tarkovsky, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” transforms from a lush, slow-burn pastiche to an audacious filmmaking gamble while maintaining the pictorial sophistication of its earlier section. It’s both languorous and eye-popping at once."

Eric Kohn Indiewire

"In his second feature after 2015’s rhapsodically received Kaili Blues, writer-director Bi Gan, 28, takes you on a rapturous ride through the night that will knock you for a loop. Since the film’s heralded debut at Cannes last year, the talk has focused on the long, unbroken take that ends the film. Shot in 3D and lasting 50 minutes of the film’s 130 minute running time, the sequence brims with hallucinatory brilliance."

Peter Travers Rolling Stone

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"Long Day’s Journey is a beautiful, smoulderingly romantic film."

Lee Marshall Screen International

"Another aesthetic comes to the fore once Luo Hongwu sits down in a cinema auditorium and puts on a pair of 3D glasses, whereupon he embarks on a nocturnal journey captured in a single 3D-shot that leads first into a tunnel, then to a pool hall and finally to a town in the grip of some festival. As the flow of constant dialogue abates, one is now free to marvel at the sensation of being led through a new, yet equally persuasive representation of a dream, where every movement seems ravishingly heightened, digression is the order of the day and even the forces of gravity can be easily suspended."

James Lattimer Sight & Sound

"What makes this 50-plus-minute sequence-shot here so special is how it blends depth-defying camerawork (Steadicams, zip-lines and drones are involved), exquisite lighting and production design — all of it captured in 3D! — with a deeply poetic style that recalls both Wong Kar Wai and Andrei Tarkovsky, tracking the main character’s gradual descent into melancholic bliss. This is bold and rare filmmaking."

Jordan Mintzner Hollywood Reporter

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Interview with Bi Gan for Indie Wire here

Bi Gan Interview for Cannes film Festival here

Q&A with Bi Gan at the NYFF at the Lincoln centre here

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