Midnight movies are no longer the attraction they were in the late 1970s and early ’80s. This sometimes seems like a shame. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” the second feature by Chinese director Bi Gan (whose 2016 debut “Kaili Blues” made an impression in art houses the world over), would make exemplary late-night communal viewing. Very often, and particularly in its second half, watching it feels like dreaming with your eyes open.
This is not just because of the imagery, which, in the first half, is heavy with depictions of water — raining on windshields and inside musty rooms, rippling in puddles, trickling in a tear down a character’s cheek.
The narrative that engulfs the movie’s male protagonist Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) is replete with elements of film noir. There’s a photo with a phone number on the back, hidden behind the back plate of a wall clock. There’s a mysterious woman in a green dress (Tang Wei, of “Lust, Caution”) who frequently asks for a light for her cigarettes. There’s a past filled with secrets.
“I might never have gone back to Kaili had my father not died,” Luo says in voice-over early in the film. If that’s not an invitation to a dark, fatalistic journey, I don’t know what is.
However, Bi Gan’s film elides actual plot elements far more than it articulates them. It’s almost as if the point is to compel the viewer to ask, “Am I missing something?” You are — and you aren’t. The movie’s second half, presented in often-startling 3D, pulls together many of the peculiar threads dropped in prior scenes. But not in a conventional fashion.
This cinematic journey is all about subterranean associations. The movie’s English-language title derives from Eugene O’Neill’s play, but almost nothing in it has a direct relation to O’Neill’s modes of content or dramaturgy. (Its Mandarin Chinese title translates to “Last Evenings on Earth,” the name of a novel by Roberto Bolaño, and it’s the same deal there.) But both halves of the movie are virtual compendiums of references to the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Visual allusions to “Ivan’s Childhood,” “Andrei Rublev” and “Stalker” are carried off beautifully, but do little more than affirm Bi Gan’s aesthetic principles — or, to put it more colloquially, give you a look inside his head.
Not since David Lynch’s “Inland Empire” has a filmmaker in such proximity to what we can call the independent mainstream undertaken quite as radical a challenge to linear narrative. And the achievement is all the more awe-inspiring given that the movie’s second half, a 3D 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.
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“Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is not rated. In Mandarin, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hour 13 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.