“If I find a wild pomelo in summer, you’ll have to grant me one wish.” — Bi Gan
Whenever I watch Bi Gan’s films, I feel myself slowly beginning to melt. A friend once described it well: all kinds of emotions seem to pour into your body at once, and every sense is enlarged beyond its usual scale.
Yes, for many people, his films are difficult to enter.
The stories are scattered. The dialogue drifts like brushwork rather than explanation. Time refuses to move in a clean line. Watching them can feel like reading a book that was never meant to be an easy novel, let alone something built for quick satisfaction. His films exist closer to poetry. Images become the measure of the lines; the lines are composed and revealed through images.
On that land of southeastern Guizhou—humid, southern, yet somehow not quite as moss-covered as one might imagine—he writes about love, departure, encounter, searching, and the passing of time. The expression is intensely emotional. It is hard to say where the beginning, climax, or ending of any one of his films truly lies. They can never fully reconcile with the habits of conventional theatrical cinema, because they are selfish in the most private sense: inward, personal, unwilling to explain themselves for the comfort of others.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Watching Bi Gan is like standing under the eaves of a subtropical southern house, waiting for a tremendous rain that has not yet fallen. Many of the story’s details are hidden inside one cleverly arranged moment after another. The feeling is like watching dark clouds gather, slowly and silently, until one instant, when the sky has no gaps left at all, the rain finally comes down.
And it is such a heavy, heavy rain.
There are so many delicate turns in the film. One scene I especially like is when the male lead provokes the woman by saying her hometown dialect is not authentic, using that small challenge as a way to ask what he really wants to ask.
Then there are those strange, beautiful details that seem to obey the logic of dream and memory rather than ordinary plot:
- Recite a spell, and the room of the person you love begins to rotate.
- If sadness becomes too deep, you may eat an apple and swallow the core along with it. In the mountains at night, there is a zipline. A broken watch can be traded for a firework. Spin a ping-pong paddle, and you may take flight. On the road, you may run into the mother you lost long ago, holding a torch in her hand.
- A woman who keeps playing the slot machine without stopping speaks softly: if she hits the wild pomelo, she will leave the county town and take a plane once in her life.
- Have you ever counted the stars?
- If you tell too many lies, the moon will cut off your ears.
In his films, I am always waiting for the next second. There is no way to know what will happen.
There are countless symbols and metaphors in this film. But does that part still have anything to do with me? Did I understand the film?
I can never answer that.
I only remember, vaguely, that as I watched it little by little, the melted feeling inside me gradually eased. My drifting soul seemed to return to my body. And without realizing it, in my eyes, there fell a rain—such a great, great rain.