Bi Gan's beautifully shot, elaborately choreographed _Long Day's Journey Into Night_ is like a cross between David Lynch and Haruki Murikami. Large parts of it explicitly -- very successfully and meticulously -- takes place in a dreamscape, inside protagonist Luo Hongwa's head. Its dream-logic incorporates bits and pieces of Luo's real-life experience, the way _Mulholland Drive_ draws on Naomi Watt's characters' journey. I suspect most of the film reflects Luo's hallucination as he lies dying while being tortured by the gangster boss of his femme fatale girlfriend Wan Qiwen (Wei Tang of _Lust, Caution_ fame). Other interpretations are surely as valid.

Therein lies its problem. Many reviews compared _Long Day_ to _In the for Love_,
even Alain Resnais. But those films exude particular times and places; their memories (personal and collective) are real. _In the Mood_ memorializes that time in history when the electric rice cooker is a novelty, when white collar wage earners share incredibly small flats. The accumulated emotional power is extraodrinary. _Long Day_'s scrambled timeline deprives the characters of our heart-felt sympathy. We hardly know who they really are. Both leads Wei Tang and Jue Huang are as good as the limited script allows them; like in typical film noir fare, the audience root for them because they are much better looking and marginally less repulsive than the gangsters they tangle with.

Kaili seems to be inside some tribal autonomous region where a different dialect
is spoken, but neither the screenplay nor the subtitles do justice to that unique aspect. The voiceover seems more ponderous than poetic -- maybe Tony Rayns should have done the translation!

The last hour of _Long Day_ is shot in an amazing location outside Kaili: a makeshift village square in the shadown of a mine and a ruined prison. That market place is a nightmarish decadent playground for adults, full of tawdry advertisement featuring partially disrobed women. The protagonist hunts for
his gun-moll ladyfriend there and finds her doppelganger, and some other woman, fighting with her lover, who may be his mother. One wishes that there are some semblance of innocence or moral redemption in the entire film, like the leads in _In the Mood for Love_, that serve as a contrast to the seediness and decay. (The last 30 minutes is supposedly a single take, which is merely a distracting gimmick; the camera eye wanders around, follows different people and horse-drawn
carts, so I didn't even notice there is no cut. Still, the director has promise.
Lou Ye's early film _Suzhou River_ also seems a style-over-substance homage
to Hitchcock, but Lou found his own calling down the road. I hope the same happens to Bi Gan.

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