Bi Gan’s new film in Cannes is daring and bold, visually wonderful, trippy and woozy in its embrace of hallucination and the heightened which means of the unreal and the dreamlike. His final film Long Day’s Journey Into Night from 2018 was an extraordinary and virtually extraterrestrial expertise within the cinema which challenged the viewers to look at what they thought about time and reminiscence; this doesn’t have fairly that energy, being successfully a portmanteau film, a few of whose sections are higher than others – although it climaxes with some gasp-inducing pictures and monitoring photographs and all of the constituent components contribute to the film’s mixture impact.
Resurrection is, maybe, an extended night time’s journey to the enlightenment of dawn; it finishes at a membership referred to as the Sunrise. It is additionally an episodic journey via Chinese historical past, ending at that historic second which continues to fascinate Chinese film-makers whose motion pictures are a method of collectively processing their emotions about it: New Year’s Eve 1999, the new century through which China was to bullishly embrace the new capitalism whereas cleaving to the political conformism of the old methods.
We are in a sort of alt-reality universe the place people have found they’ll dwell indefinitely if they don’t dream, an exercise which burns up people like a lit candle. Bi Gan leaves it as much as us to ponder what that means for overpopulation.
But there is one outlier, one dissident, a person who does dream – he is a sacred monster referred to as the Fantasmer (Jackson Yee) and the paradox is that the Fantasmer’s ecstatic notion of illusions and desires permits him to reincarnate and resurrect in an unique number of lowlife existences at totally different historic instances within the final century – and a girl enters his life. Is it the girl perceiving these occasions, or is the Fantasmer doing it?
At the start of the century, and occupying a sort of vintage silent-movie world, he is a white-faced determine just like the vampire Nosferatu being tended to by a mysterious girl (performed by longtime Hou Hsiao-shen performer Shu Qi). During the second world struggle he is concerned in a violent imbroglio in a mirror store – shades of Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai maybe – involving a theremin. We flashforward 20 years and our time-travelling itinerant Fantasmer is in a distant and wintry temple the place he breaks a Buddha statue and encounters a Spirit of Bitterness.
Some a long time later, he is a crooked card-sharp who inveigles somewhat woman right into a rip-off he’s received going towards a neighborhood gangster and lastly we’re on the brink of the new century through which the Fantasmer meets one other mobster Mr Luo – his vampiric future, and the film’s personal visuals, ascend to a new aircraft.
It is a deeply mysterious film whose enigma extends to the title – is what is taking place “resurrection” in any clear transformative sense? Or is it only a steady flickering shape-shifting: the Fantasmer only a pulsating star on the far-reaches of the universe, that may in just a few hundred thousand years explode or collapse in on itself?
Asking or answering these questions will not be the film’s level and its riddling high quality, mixed with its spectacular visible results, could depart some audiences agnostic – and I personally wasn’t positive about the silent-movie kind results. Yet it’s a piece of actual artistry.
