From its opening moments,Chinese director Bi Gan’s latest filmResurrectionfeels like something made outside of time.Employing a silent film aesthetic, with skipped frames, slightly askew framing, and title cards trying valiantly to explain the circumstances of those we see on screen, it’s a heady mix akin to the experimentation ofGuy Maddin— a resolutely weird but immensely captivating detour from contemporary cinematic expression.
Bi Ganis no stranger to making things a challenge for his audience. Last atCanneswith 2018’sgi, that film’s 138-minute running time culminated in an hour-long, single-shot sequence in 3D that literally split the film apart. His latest is more formally divided but no less challenging, a tale told in six chapters interwoven through time and space,each employing differing genre elements and filmic techniques to take the audience on a unique, if occasionally frustrating, journey.
‘Resurrection’s Story Spans Time and Space
Making linear sense of the meanderings of the film’s narrative may be beyond the point, but, essentially, the film is about reality vs fantasy, exploring experiences through one’s senses, and the way that differing moments can affect others in surprising ways, and so on. This is a film that leads from darkness to light, from the evening representing China’s past to a nightclub overtly dubbed “Sunrise” that speaks to the immense social and political changes that have characterized the formerly isolated nation in fundamental ways.
It’s also, on a base level, the tale of a man and a woman, caught in a temporal web that conjoins them as each must make their way through a century of upheaval. We spend our time with two individuals tied through these various time jumps: The Fantasmer itself (Jackson Yee), and an enigmatic woman (Shu Qi) who consistently plays a role that at times provides guidance, and at others, obstructions, with the unfolding of each new time period.Their connection mixes temporal linearity with backwards-looking remembrances, a see-saw of settings and emotions that forms a strange, provocative amalgamation.
Some of these temporal moments are more overtly metaphorical than others, including a mirrored section that is both evocative and explicitly referencing the way seemingly disparate elements are made to intersect, while others are far more challenging to parse. While things certainly get truly odd, there remains a method to the madness. Throughout, there’s a feeling that things presented are graspable but perhaps not with obvious meaning.
A brief aside about the process whereby the film made its way to its festival premiere. This title was one of the last to be announced, its inclusion long suspected but, supposedly, held back in order to clear China’s notoriously strict censorship laws. Of course, one can read many things into the film’s storyline, and a generous reading would be to say there are moments critical of some of the more cataclysmic moments that have afflicted millions over the decades during the country’s recent rise. At the same time, by being bathed in metaphor and fantasy, there’s a convenient excuse to avoid truly dealing with any aspects of Chinese society that may demand being interrogated, andthe less charitable may see these flights of fancy as obscuring more than illuminating.
Navigating Obscurity and Finding Meaning in the Most Challenging of ‘Resurrection’s Moments
One way of further distancing from any challenge to actuality is how the film borrows fromactual events like World War II, but set upon an alternate timeline. In this world, most people can live forever as they’ve lost the ability to dream, as if the very cost of unconscious imagining, seemingly intrinsic to what makes us human, is the very act that causes our doom. There are some individuals called Fantasmers who are both sacred and rare, gifted with the ability to apprehend illusions.As they dream, they help recreate the world, eventually reincarnating after several years, causing a time jump in the storytelling and bestowing the film its title.
Even at its most obscure, the film has the feeling of being carefully guided by the director leading us along. To hammer the point, this aspect is made explicit early on with the opening sequence as we literally see hands manipulating larger in scale than the surroundings, rearranging the space. Later on, the very mechanisms of cinema, in relation to genre conventions likethe gangster film, the period piece, or even the vampire movie, are all employed to both remind us of the artifice (the act of dreaming, as it were), and our relationship as audience members to what the filmmaker is doling out.
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Resurrectionis, at times, exceptional,even if the end result doesn’t quite live up to its ambitions. The latter half suffers in particularly from the inherent sense of redundant repetition due to its formal structure, and lingering too long in certain sequences once the point has been made repeatedly. Some may find its technical achievements and bold vision intoxicating, others may be dismayed at the almost camp elements that undermine whatever sense of playful exuberance the early scenes provided.
A more fitful response toResurrectionlikely falls in the middle, applauding the director for trying in earnest to stretch cinema’s boundaries, while being honest that not all of its works. There’s a sense of play akin toTerry Gilliam’s finest works here, just as one can see echoes of more cerebral filmmakers likeAndrei Tarkovski, or visionaries likeF.W. Murnau.
Rather than simply name-checking those from the past (dreaming past dreams, as it were), Bi Gan provides a forward-looking vision that’s both referential and truly unique.Resurrectionis a puzzlebox to be probed, a dream not simply to be decoded to provide a singular interpretation, but one to be enraptured as you are caught up in its fragmented logic, soothed by its smoke-filled spaces, and stunned by the myriad connections shared between its two central characters.
Resurrection
Resurrection is a film set in a world where humanity can no longer dream. It follows a creature captivated by remnants of the dreamworld and a woman who can perceive these fading illusions. She ventures into the creature’s dreams, searching for the truth concealed within these forgotten visions.
