Long Day's Journey Into Night, Cecil B Demented

The transience of passion in Long Day's Journey Into Night

Bi Gan's Long Day's Journey Into Night is a largely successful art film that has drawn more attention for its technique than its artistic merit. The first half of the film chronicles protagonist Luo Hongwu searching for a lost love: a gangster's moll, Wan Qiwen, who he romanced twenty years earlier. The scenes of him on Qiwen's trail are intercut with flashbacks of their affair. The chronology is scrambled and the director chooses poetic effects over narrative coherence. The local reviewer from the Portland Mercury threw up his hands at the film's plot, but the narrative strategy worked for me. The film is a mystery that will reward multiple viewings.

The film further obfuscates the plot by having his two main actresses assay different roles in the second half, a surrealist technique. Indeed, the second half of the film is a dive into the protagonist's unconscious. Seemingly near the end of his journey for his lost love, he kills time by entering a cinema and donning 3D glasses, a cue for the audience to do so also. The remaining half of the film is one long tracking shot following Luo Hongwu. He starts his dream-like journey deep in a mine shaft and then emerges to find himself in a labyrinth like ancient fortress which houses a pool hall and karaoke theater. Eternal recurrence and repetition compulsion are the order of the day, as our hero searches like Orpheus for his lost love.

Long Day's Journey Into Night suffers from an art film languor, somewhat akin to Last Year at Marienbad. Mr. Bi can surely be accused of artistic overreach in what is only his second feature. However, his attention to locale has already established him as an auteur to watch. His portrait of the Guizhou Province, in this film and his first feature, Kaili Blues, strikes a contrast with the glistening cityscapes of modern China. Instead of the wonders of urban China, we are shown the impoverished underbelly. Bi emphasizes the struggles of the urban poor surrounded by rust, decay, crumbling structures and mudslides.

Mr. Bi uses graceful pans to bridge time and space. It is his lyricism, his celebration of the flowering of love amidst the chaos and rubble, that won me over to this film. Bi juxtaposes transience and eternity within this perhaps overlong meditation on romantic love. Stopped clocks and watches are the stand-ins for eternity. That Mr. Bi has chosen to make his case for transient passion, the flickering flame of love, is encapsulated by the film's final frame.

John Waters' Cecil B. Demented, from 2000, is a different kind of art film, but Waters uses his ramshackle style to also celebrate passion. In this case, his enthusiasm for his favorite film artists and fading (or faded) movie palaces. The plot, as in every other Waters feature, is about borderline criminal misfits putting on a show. There is a thin line in Waters' work between criminal behavior and performance art. The setting is, as usual, Baltimore and this Charm City bred lad cannot hope to be objective about a film that utilizes familiar and beloved haunts of his youth. To sum up succinctly: better than Serial Mom, but not as funny as Pecker. In retrospect, it is especially fun to see young thesps such as Michael (Mike here) Shannon, Alicia Witt and Maggie Gyllenhaal give their all for the director's looney vision. As Waters himself has noted, he got to use actors who were either rising or falling in their careers. On the downslope, Melanie Griffith and Stephen Dorff give committed performances and perhaps they should have been. Mr. Waters' primitive technique inches forward here: he uses wipes and even a POV shot near the end. Still, it is his cramming in almost every seedy and decrepit movie theater in the Baltimore metro area that marks this as a labor of love.

                             

The Apex: The last adult theater in Baltimore. Now a grocery store.