Noir as Logic in Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Kino Lorber
The first time you watch Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night you walk out of it speechless, and gradually make your way out of the muck from there. Things noticed become half-baked connections, and then theories and so on. It’s like waking from a dream and attempting to piece together those events that a moment ago were so vivid and now only foggily remembered. But the daze will never really lift; you’ll never have a eureka moment where it all suddenly makes sense. This is partially because the last act of the film is maybe a dream, maybe a 3D movie-within-a-movie. Any narrative momentum evaporates the instant you put on your 3D glasses for an hour-long single take that ends the film; the plot, which has been only vaguely formed up to that point, is discarded.
Even the film’s one tether to reality, in its adoption of the familiar filmmaking trappings of film noir, becomes wobbly at this point. From the first scene, the noir signifiers are all there: the femme fatale, the dingy rooms, the criminal element, the smoking, the overhead lights, the flashbacks, the voiceover, the desperation. They make you think you have a hang on Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but it’s a red herring. Those proliferating noir symbols give you a false sense of security, a feeling that you might know where this is going, when really their place in this swirling, elliptical narrative is as window trimmings on the “impenetrable” main event underneath. But the film is only impenetrable unless you cling to those signposts, trying to fit the last hour into the framework they’d seem to augur rather than letting go of the reins, rather than drifting along with the movie into a space where the noirish characteristics are doubled to become funhouse mirrors, reflecting a distorted version of the world we’d been inhabiting up to that point. In that abstracted, fragmented space, the hardboiled genre still serves as a guide to navigating the film, only more obliquely, centering on a message about the futility of searching for the past that would be at home in any noir.
Set in and around the town of Kaili in southeastern China, the film starts with Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue, with a Jean-Paul Belmondo-ish nose and capable of several registers of world-weariness) waking up in a moldering hotel room, a bright pink neon sign outside the window, ruminating about a long-lost lover to the nosy girl he’s picked up. Through Hongwu’s voiceover we learn that he never knew her name, her age, where she was from, and that ever since she disappeared, she shows up in his dreams whenever he’s about to forget her. This mystery woman, known to him as Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei of Lust, Caution), forms the crux of the story as it fractures into two timelines and later into unreality, as Hongwu searches for her in the present while flashing back to his relationship with her nearly twenty years earlier. He starts his quest to find her when he finds an old photo of her with a phone number and the name Tai Zhaomei written on the back. Even at this relatively straightforward stage, as Hongwu pieces together clues of where Qiwen went, the film is glacially paced, exposition-light, and references enough oblique, symbolism-laden ideas running through Hongwu’s consciousness to obscure the throughline of his search, forming a haze that descends over the story.
In the first half’s dual timelines (with flashbacks detailing how Hongwu met Qiwen after her gangster boyfriend murdered his friend Wildcat), the staples of film noir are still visible through that haze. It starts with the voiceover, Hongwu remembering the enigmatic Qiwen and explaining his attraction to danger like he’s Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity. This extends to the dialogue in the flashbacks, the kind of antagonistic back and forth between our hero and the initially wary gangster’s moll he’s pursuing. While he starts following Qiwen to figure out what happened to Wildcat, things eventually turn romantic, setting into motion a plot to kill her boyfriend and skip town. But before they can become the archetypal lovers on the run, Qiwen disappears, leaving a hole in Hongwu that persists two decades later.
Kino Lorber
In the present, then, is this detective framework, of Hongwu’s dogged quest to find her through a series of incomplete stories, told to him by Qiwen’s old friend Tai Zhaomei, sitting in prison; or her hotel owner husband in a nearby town, who she’s just divorced; or the owner of the karaoke bar in Dangmai she sings at, who meets Hongwu amongst the rubble of demolished buildings, telling him her place is due to be torn down the next day. The sense of loss is pervasive, as everyone Hongwu talks to seems half-full, quiet and tired from the persistent missing of an essential piece. Together with the endless rain and the rust it brings across the landscape of Kaili, the cracked mirrors and desolate buildings, physical decay and corrosion combine with imperfect and melancholy people to build this world of loss, of emptiness. It’s as though something’s been taken and darkness crept in to fill the void, maybe a more mournful version of the corrupt world filled with imperfect people that characterizes noir.
It’s in a dingy movie theatre Hongwu heads into to wait for the karaoke bar to open that the story gets flipped. The possibility of finally meeting Qiwen at the bar is extinguished once Hongwu puts on his 3D glasses to watch the movie, the viewer instructed to do the same as a title card, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” appears. It starts, a single continuous shot, with Hongwu in a mine shaft, later making his way to a makeshift pool hall, run by a woman named Kaizhen (who looks exactly like Qiwen), and then to a karaoke contest.
How to exactly define the space this all occurs in is up for debate, but it’s indisputably an uncanny simulacrum of the world we’ve inhabited thus far, a Mulholland Drive-esque alternate universe. Upon first watch it would seem to be a dream, straddling reality and unreality. Nearly every character and symbol that appeared in the first half is refracted here, whether to the effect of subverting or expanding upon their meaning or just meriting a mention. Those in the latter category, like the “Wild Pomelo Karaoke Contest” referencing the pomelos that Qiwen always asked for, or a remote-controlled toy truck resembling Hongwu’s driving up to the stool on which Kaizhen sits, playing slots, leading him to her, are what give this half its dreamlike character, like you can feel Hongwu’s subconscious synapses firing, making connections.
Thematic motifs are repeated as well, as though they’re manifestations of things that have been on Hongwu’s mind, like the use of apples as an expression of unspeakable sadness, devoured by Wildcat in a flashback and here by Hongwu. There’s something about this desire to consume, to bite down hard into crisp sweet fruit to counterbalance the hot wet tears welling in your eyes, tears another form of the water that leads to decay. On the other end of the despair that apples represent is the delirious optimism of spinning, first mentioned by Tai Zhaomei in her telling of an urban legend about a house owned by the happiest, most in-love couple that would spin when a spell was recited. In the second half, Hongwu and Kaizhen spin a ping pong paddle to fly to a house that Kaizhen describes almost identically to the one Zhaomei talked about. Once in the house, now empty, chandelier missing, burned out, Hongwu and Kaizhen kiss, and it begins to spin, this incongruously optimistic moment in which you think maybe these two people, if they let go of their hesitations and their pasts, could be those two perfect lovers in the spinning house.
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The most notable doubles are of Wildcat’s mom/the woman with red hair and Qiwen/Kaizhen. In the first half, Wildcat’s mom (Sylvia Chang) is caught by that same sadness of emptiness, left by her husband, her son killed. She’s a hairdresser, talking about how stupid it would be to dye one’s hair red as she dissuades Hongwu from his quest. A storm is coming, an impending mudslide predicted, and Hongwu asks if she’s worried. She’s not; mudslides aren’t worth worrying about, chasing after the past is. In the second half Chang appears at the Wild Pomelo Karaoke Contest, hair dyed bright red, holding a huge lit torch: one of the bystanders remarks to Hongwu that the crazy woman is back again. Hongwu follows her to her husband’s car, where they row about how she burnt their house down, the house Hongwu and Kaizhen will fly to later. Here in this mirror world the character, always with a sharp edge to her words, seems to have replaced her grief with anger.
The pool hall owner Kaizhen is so similar to Qiwen that the line between them blurs for Hongwu. Her hairstyle is different, but she’s another girl from Kaili without a Kaili accent, with another criminal boyfriend, introducing herself to Hongwu in the same prickly way by greeting with skepticism his claim that she looks like someone he knows. Hongwu promises to leave her alone after she sings a song at the karaoke contest, so there they go, waiting for her turn to come up until she asks if he wants to see the spinning house. Kaizhen differs from Qiwen in that she’s tangible, she’s actually there, not a mirage that Hongwu has constructed and reconstructed in his head over two decades. Hongwu seems to recognize this fact, at one point telling Kaizhen he wishes “she was you” (notably, not that “you were her”) and lamenting how short this night is.
Whether to read his realization as a turning point or a false flag lies in whether the second half is a dream or a movie. Dreams and movies are constantly referenced throughout the film, from Hongwu’s opening voiceover (“Every time I saw her, I knew I was in a dream again.”) to Qiwen and Hongwu’s habit during their brief relationship of going to the movies. So is the difference between fact and fiction and the difficulty of telling one from the other. As Hongwu says, dreams are lost memories, a mix of truth and lies, while films are all lies. It’s beside the point, and less fun honestly, to decide if it’s definitively a dream or a movie, but the interpretation that Hongwu is watching a movie (and hasn’t just passed out during one) is more likely, starting with the way the second half is announced by title card and shot in 3D. And if films are “all lies,” this reading subverts any promise the sequence holds, of Hongwu finding any kind of salvation in his quest, affirming Long Day’s Journey’s apparent central theme, voiced by Wildcat’s mom: don’t chase the past.
Likewise, if the second half is a movie-within-a-movie, it falls more in line with Long Day’s Journey’s noir bent, particularly in the fatalistic sense that Hongwu’s journey is futile and that chasing the past has never done anyone any good. In the hardboiled reality of noir, just underneath the placid exteriors of Americana—the shiny cars, the fluorescent lights, the California sunshine—is darkness waiting to escape, full of mobsters, disillusioned private eyes, and women with ulterior motives, never outright villains, since they claim the story’s center, but a series of busted-up, broken people who rarely do the right thing. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is more dreamy, more melancholy in its depiction of these broken people, but at its core knows that what they’re looking for, what they’re trying to recover to make themselves whole again is never going to be there. And while the film treats them gently, it underscores how fruitless their respective searches will be. Any points of optimism, like Hongwu and Kaizhen’s kiss, his tenuous reconnection to his old girlfriend through her double, are a false hope. With film as a guide, both in the historical genre of noir and the method of interpreting the last half, Hongwu is doomed to fail, doomed to try endlessly to repeat the past as the reverie of his long night is revealed to be all lies, as ephemeral as the images flitting across the screen in front of him.