Long Day's Journey into Night.

‘When people were sad, they would eat an apple, the whole thing, core and all,’ says Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue), the protagonist in Bi Gan’s hypnotic film-noir Long Day’s Journey into Night. What follows is a two-minute scene in which we stare into the eyes of a boy, depressed and crying, as he takes an apple from his mother, resting on his shoulder, and eats it, core and all. It’s a sort of microcosm for the entire movie, really: beautifully melancholic, slow, but so opaque in its meaning to the overall narrative that it’s almost necessary to take each scene as its own. In fact, before the title card plays (which comes a staggering 70 minutes in), you wouldn’t blame a viewer, so lost under the gorgeous neon lights and pitter-patter of raindrops, the sporadic violence and poetic monologues, for having next to no idea what’s going on. And as you watch this boy eat the apple, core and all, it becomes easy to wonder where exactly the core to this movie is, or whether it too has been swallowed.

Luo Hongwu is a casino manager who has returned to his hometown of Kaili after the sudden death of his father. Upon coming back, he begins to search for his old love, Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei). Rooting through his old memories, Luo scours the streets of Kaili, trying to find her and finding a new possible future for both of them.

That’s a narrative rife with potential, as we’ve seen done in many a film noir before, and the film cleverly uses an audience's pre-established familiarity with those works as a clothesline onto which Gan spouts out his poetic prose. This is as much a detective film as a movie about the movies. Luo’s scattershot recollection of the events of his childhood, stapled randomly throughout the first half, is a filmic version of the events of the second. An idealised lie, well, partly. Then the second half comes, and its outright refusal to cut and stay real-time, despite its still dreamlike logic, is his memories, as said by Wan Qiwen herself. It all works because the ideas, tropes and cliches of the genre are used so broadly that it can play fast and loose with them, becoming the barest of bare detective stories.

Whether that will work for you will depend on how easily you can give yourself over to a vibe. Regardless of one's penchant for abstract structure, Gan’s camerawork is so rich that it’s hard not to swoon. The sets here are so textured, what with all the rain often falling onto the lens and the cracks in the walls; it all feels idiomatic of a time not too long ago that we can never get back to. And the camera seldom stops! Like Luo, we’re moving without going anywhere; Gan’s frames always feigning change. It is impossible to talk about Long Day’s Journey into Night without discussing that final 59-minute-long take, intended to be seen in 3D. One thinks of Spielberg’s elaborate crane shots in West Side Story or the opening shot in Touch of Evil. It’s masterfully staged for something as impossibly dense as it is. Though as much as that final hour is a masterfully virtuosic achievement, around halfway through it loses a lot of its leverage, and my mind kept thinking about how the shot was done, not what the shot was doing. Purposely keeping one side of the table-tennis shot out of frame is a cute trick, but Luo demanding the boy pot the shot felt a little self-aggrandising – one big, ‘hey, look, we did this in one take’ towards the audience.

It’s clear to anyone that Gan has an eye for the cinematic, and he shows it, maybe a little too much. What you’ve got here with Long Day's Journey into Night is an incredibly patient work whose images will live far longer than the characters within them, and one that will divide everyone between ‘masterpiece’ and 'pretentious shit of nothingness’, directly down the middle. Whatever Bi Gan’s next work is, I’ll be there, knowing it will be a peach. Hopefully, he can find the core, so long as he’s not too busy eating them.