Quiet Night Thoughts Warped Time in Three Asian Arthouse Films

‘Quiet Night Thoughts’, one of China’s most famous poems,² by Li Bai,³ one of the country’s most historically significant poets, may have been written over twelve centuries ago, but its spartan, homesick imagery and the liminal, dreamlike state it evokes have peculiar kinship with three very different yet thematically similar 2018 arthouse films from across the East Asian region. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, by Chinese director Bi Gan, a shady antihero goes on a surreal search through his home town for a lost lover. In Cities of Last Things, by Taiwan-based Malaysian director Ho Wi Ding, a police detective’s hard-boiled psychology is reverse-engineered from past relationships with women. And in Winter’s Night, by South Korean director Jang Woo-jin, a long-married couple are forced to confront their relationship when they get stranded overnight at the temple where they had their first date. These three films – which premiered at the Cannes, Toronto and Jeonju film festivals, respectively – share a distinctive, expressly haunted, deconstructed approach to time, the night and memory, even as they differ in the means by which they achieve it.

Before my bed there is bright moonlight So that it seems like frost on the ground: Lifting my head I watch the bright moon, Lowering my head I dream that I’m home.
—Li Bai¹

Any three such wilfully enigmatic works will constitute something of a reflecting pool: we may see only what we want to in them, and magnify commonalities that would not otherwise present themselves. But while taking to heart another lesson from Li – who is perhaps best known in the West as the poet (an image irresistibly evoked in the upside-down pondside kissing scene in Long Day’s Journey) – there is still a sense that they flow along the same singular current. If their woozy atemporality is not exactly a new wave in Asian cinema (and indeed has its forebears in the films of Wong Kar Wai, Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and even Hong Sang-soo), this confluence, at this moment in time, is at least a significant ripple.