Ed Halter
Only dreamers left alive: the visual pleasures and overreaching ambitions of Bi Gan’s latest film.
Jackson Yee as the Deliriant in Resurrection. Courtesy Janus Films.
Resurrection, directed by Bi Gan,
now playing in theaters
• • •
A circus train of six interconnected mini-movies, each executed in a distinct visual style, Bi Gan’s overweeningly ambitious Resurrection attempts to reenvision the full span of the twentieth century in just over two and a half content-maximalist hours. Viewers are strapped into a technically impressive if enervating ride through a synthetic history of moving images that begins with a steampunk sequence evoking the Lumières, wanders through a noir mystery and an ’80s crime movie, and ends with a slick scene set on New Year’s Eve in 1999, the last realized in one virtuosic, unbroken forty-minute shot. The film’s unabashedly hokey premise, spelled out in text during its first moments, imagines a world in which most humans have achieved immortality by ceasing to dream, but some rebellious types, known as Deliriants, continue to do so, even if their drug-like addiction to wild, imaginative visions reshapes their bodies into cadaverous bags of flesh—a fate that Resurrection’s target audience of hardcore cinephiles will surely find relatable. The largely stand-alone chapters are tangentially linked by a shared Deliriant protagonist (Jackson Yee), who transmigrates between them by inhabiting a series of otherwise disconnected characters, recapitulating episodes inspired by a hundred years of filmmaking as he goes.
Shu Qi as the Great Other in Resurrection. Courtesy Janus Films.
Resurrection’s dense, gooey first twenty minutes provide a studied if free-form emulation of early film as a means of introducing the Deliriant, whom we see being tended to by a stately female photographer (famed Hou Hsiao-hsien regular Shu Qi). Formal aspects of cinema’s initial decades are hodgepodged together as Bi cycles through low frame rates, fixed camera angles, and tinted colors to Expressionist shadowing, Deco architecture, and a long sideways tracking shot through geometric furniture. It’s a fun house of antique visual effects. The footage is streaked with fake dust and ersatz emulsion scratches; a phenakistoscope studded with opium poppies whirls up and into the screen like the logo of a children’s show. Hoping to help the decrepit Deliriant, the photographer opens up his torso to find a cavity that looks like a 35mm projector—“the device that makes the Deliriant’s heart work,” a parchment-textured intertitle tells us—and inserts a blood-red roll of film into its gears. Suddenly, the hunchbacked creature is transported to a glowing green pasture, joyously reenacting the Lumières’ primitive comedy L’arroseur arrosé to a reverberating symphonic score.
Li Gengxi as Tai Zhaomei in Resurrection. Courtesy Janus Films.
The next tale is a grim jumble of mid-century diesel-gray, evoking both Jean-Pierre Melville and La jetée, with a hall-of-mirrors shoot-out à la Lady from Shanghai and a theremin session, played with bloody hands. After that comes a more minimalist, meditative half hour taking place in an abandoned Buddhist temple, covered in snow, where Yee’s character is visited by a brusque ghost in the form of his father who calls himself the Spirit of Bitterness (Chen Yongzhong). In the fourth scenario, taking place in a bustling market city and shot with Wong Kar-wai gold-green sheen, Yee is a con artist who takes on a chatty young girl (Guo Mucheng) as his sidekick. The final 1999 sequence introduces a different companion in the form of Tai Zhaomei (Li Gengxi), a twentysomething vampire hottie in Converse All Stars and Matrix sunglasses, who together with Yee’s character becomes entangled with mob boss Mr. Luo (Huang Jue), culminating in a violent massacre at a karaoke bar called the Sunrise. The operations of the sinuous forty-minute take become the central attraction in the chaotic scene, as the camera shifts in the midst of the shot from third- to first-person perspective and back again with admirable elegance.
Li Gengxi as Tai Zhaomei in Resurrection. Courtesy Janus Films.
Bi’s previous efforts, the muted and naturalistic Kaili Blues (2015) and the visually inventive, conceptually rich Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018), were festival prizewinners, quickly establishing the young director (now thirty-six) as a rising star. Improbably, Journey broke box-office records in China, becoming the country’s highest-grossing art-house film to date. Key to this success was a viral marketing campaign that encouraged couples to see the film together on New Year’s Eve and kiss at the stroke of midnight along with its characters. But Journey’s measured pace, canny formalism, and hour-long single-shot 3D finale proved divisive with would-be canoodlers, causing widespread walkouts and the social-media hashtag “Can’t understand Long Day’s Journey into Night.” In that context, Bi’s doubling down on optical wizardry and world-cinema references (as well as the New Year’s Eve theme) in Resurrection can be read as either a defiant stance against market norms or petulant self-gratification in the face of popular rejection.
Jackson Yee as the Deliriant in Resurrection. Courtesy Janus Films.
Resurrection could never be accused of lacking visual pleasures, even memorable ones: for instance, a single brief shot, from the Spirit of Bitterness episode, drifting slowly upward against a snowy hillside to peer at the temple, sticks in the mind as a nearly perfect painting in motion. But the film’s tragic overreach stems from its desire to lament the end of cinema by gorging itself on a concatenation of flashy set pieces, until the viewer vicariously grows dyspeptic. And while Resurrection is emphatically a film of ideas, they are mostly corny ones. Is anything really at stake here besides a few banalities about the eternal truths of the heart and the lost magic of cinema? The latter lament is one that movie lovers may understandably be susceptible to, given the global industry’s bleak future not only in the face of streaming and AI but also, you know, everything else. Maybe that’s why such a shameless mash note to the seventh art wowed ’em at Cannes, where the film garnered a special jury prize and numerous critical lauds. Resurrection’s true protagonist is not Yee but Bi, who gets to burrow deeper into the role of the untrammeled auteur, performing wild feats of fancy, one after another, for today’s image-hungry cinephile.
Ed Halter is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for cinema in all its forms in Brooklyn, New York, and Critic in Residence at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.