It felt as though instead of making a film, they tried to make ART, not knowing that art cannot be made. First you make a film you love and then you hope the art magically appears when you've finished.

I just finished watching Bi Gan’s Long Day's Journey into Night. Two lines from the first half left a deep impression on me. Roughly translated, they are: • "Everything you're thinking of, I've already thought through." • "For those flying into space, no part of the body has anything to rest on." The dialogue leading up to the final kiss in the second half was also exceptionally crafted. I absolutely loved the transition from the moon looking a bit dim to the house beginning to spin. The reason I loved it wasn't just because the dialogue was somewhat understated, creating a pleasant surprise. It was because Kaizhen gave Luo Hongwu a second chance. While this certainly forms a narrative loop within the film, what is more important is how shockingly true to real life it feels. A few words on the long takes: Bi Gan’s long takes always give me the illusion that they are actually easy to film. I think that just proves this director is truly masterful.

There comes a point, after falling asleep in the cinema, when nothing makes sense anymore and it's best to just let yourself go.

A luminous esoteric puzzle The film is the love child of Andrei Tarkovsky and Wong Kar-wai, garnished with a truly batshit insane salad-dressing made up of an unholy mixture of filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, Guy Maddin, and Leos Carax, playwrights Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, poet Paul Celan, painters Marc Chagall, Francis Bacon, and Jackson Pollack, and novelists Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Patrick Modiano; not exactly a compendium of the most accessible artists of all time. As unconcerned with formal conventionality as it is with narrative resolution, this is an art-house movie through and through, an esoteric puzzle made up of two distinct parts. Whilst the 2D first half is a measured, but reasonably conventional albeit non-linear noir, the second is composed of an unbroken 50-minute 3D shot that's as aesthetically audacious as it is narratively elliptical. The second feature from 30-year-old self-educated writer/director Bi Gan, Long Day's Journey is aggressively enigmatic. But if you can get past the absence of character arcs, the formal daring, the languorous pacing, and the resistance to anything approaching definitive conclusions, and go with the film on its own terms, you'll find a fascinatingly esoteric examination of the protean nature of memory, a film that in both form and content seems to belie its writer/director's youth and relative inexperience. For my complete review, please visit: https://boxd.it/Wl64H

Bi Gan peaked into my subconscious and picked from my absolute favorite films, mixed them up, and sprinkled them into one of the most unique films I’ve ever seen. This is a knockout. This is :asterisk_symbol::asterisk_symbol:it.:asterisk_symbol::asterisk_symbol: