Long Day’s Journey into Night -

and the beautiful failure of Chinese storytelling.

Recently, I reconnected with an old friend in San Francisco. We used to catch films at the Alamo in the Mission, walking and talking back to his place for summer figs, crumbled goat cheese, a combination I cannot shake from SF’s Indian Summers, two weeks of blistering heat that char the sky unforgettable.

The first few moments of the film lure you deep into an entrancing world, distant and nearly dystopian, and I immediately thought of him. I dm’ed him on Instagram, reminded of the way he sulked by the film’s mood.

Slow. Lush.

Neon.

Literary. Dark.

Everything I like in a film. Think a time-lapsed Blade Runner with Wong Kar Wai dizziness. But this drags on for too long.

In intermission, I read up on the movie, finding that the last half is done in 3D, immediately wrecked with disappointment from the big screen of my 12'’ Macbook. It would’ve made a stronger impression on me.

But the film ultimately fails in narrative, relying too heavily on aesthetics. Director Bi Gan, with Tarkovsky* steam up his ass and subtle influences from Bolano and Modiano, failed to create a substantial film experience when we think about the mechanics of memory in regards to a cohesive narrative.

*There is even a scene in which a glass of water slides across a table. Yes, as a matter of fact, I did cringe.

We lose track and sight of what we’re supposed to looking for with our main character as he wanders. Sure, memory does this to us, but when you’re trying to tell a story at the same time, it’s bound to end up wishy-washy. Bi Gan disregards trying to fix this, and follows through with egotism heavily focused on mood.

Why now and why is the next predictable?

He already established mood in the first half, so when we see it spill through the last half, we roll our eyes and think, why now and why is the next predictable?

We can praise great acclaim to the single shot take of the last half of the movie, but there are obvious slights. You can see where the camera struggles to mount itself onto a dolly for the “flight scene” (completely laughable in our impatience) and it happens again somewhere in the last fifteen minutes.

On top of this, when my friend and I Facetime’d each other after our individual viewings, he expressed to me how poor Chinese movies were made.

The first obvious: sound-mixing.

Most Chinese movies edit in dialogue and sound post-production, so if you hear any sound issues when it comes to diagetic and non-diagetic sound, don’t worry, you’re not crazy! I first experienced this when I saw The Wandering Earth. I thought it was poorly edited, only to have my assumptions confirmed when my friend called.

This is because of China’s amazing use of censorship. Curse words, banned. Anything about the CCP, banned. And so, most films are dubbed in Chinese. Same with films from abroad. So the mainland Chinese population have no real frame of reference of how a movie is made properly.

Budget isn’t the question. 50 million dollars were placed into The Wandering Earth (an easily recognizable end-of-the-world sci-fi flick). They claim it’s too expensive to properly sound-mix. The Arrival (a linguistic approach to alien invasion) carried a budget of 47 million. So please, China, don’t tell me that Italian editing systems in the sixties is favorable to today’s standards in the film industry.

Truth is, there was plenty of potential for this movie to be great. Well written lines. Incredible background stories. All of it garnered intrigue. Execution was, unfortunately, done poorly.

“Too much ego and unaware of everything around itself,” I said.

“People aren’t talking to each other anymore,” he said.

“People only ever want to hear themselves, nothing else.”

And here we both were, 2 hours into a call, in his San Francisco night and my unfinished afternoon in monsoon Korea.