Long Day's Journey Into Night

‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ is certain to test the patience of some audiences. It may be too esoteric, too inward, too meditative, perhaps appear too aimless. However, there’s was something about it that fascinated me, whether it was the protagonist’s myth-like search into his physical and metaphysical past (played with weary longing by Jue Huang) or the uncompromising and careful manner of Gan Bi’s storytelling. The film is much more than its famous set-piece, and at the same time all about that set-piece; a feat of filmmaking that is as impressive as it is dramaturgically vital, where dream and fantasy and longing flow together like a river, one that invites you to step in and float along with it, wherever it takes you.

• Daniel Lammin

Read Daniel's full article... https://www.maketheswitch.com.au/article/review-long-days-journey-into-night-art-and-technology-meet-in-a-dream-like-film-noir

A luminous esoteric puzzle

Les lieux que nous avons connus n'appartiennent pas qu'au monde de l'espace où nous les situons pour plus de facilité. Ils n'étaient qu'une mince tranche au milieu d'impressions contiguës qui formaient notre vie d'alors; le souvenir d'une certaine image n'est que le regret d'un certain instant; et les maisons, les routes, les avenues, sont fugitives, hélas! comme les années.

[The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held betwe__en the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.]

• Marcel Proust; Du côté de chez Swann (1913)

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

• Milan Kundera; Ignorance (2000)

Marketed in China as a romance, 地球最後的夜晚 [lit. trans. Last Evenings on Earth] was released on December 31, 2018, earning an unexpected $38 million at the Chinese box office on its first night. However, when the young couples looking forward to a mainstream romantic date movie to ring in the New Year found themselves watching a cryptic 150-minute labyrinthine meditation on the nature of memory, with the niceties of plot and character development very much subservient to mood, tone, and formal experimentation, they reacted with bemusement, to put it mildly. January 1 saw a flurry of angry social media posts, with "can't understand Last Evenings on Earth" trending, and the forums of ticket merchant Maoyan flooded with negative reviews, earning the film an audience rating of 2.8/10. Needless to say, business dropped off somewhat thereafter, and when the film's theatrical run concluded three weeks later, it had earned a total of $41 mi...

Long Day’s Journey into Night is a slow, dreamlike film where memory blurs into story. Luo returns home, searching for a woman from his past—but really, he’s chasing who he was when he loved her. The plot is deliberately disorienting: places shift, objects repeat, time folds. The hour-long single take in the second half is stunning and surreal. It won’t be for everyone, but if you surrender to it, there’s something quietly moving underneath it all.