I recently had the experience — familiar, but all too rare — of walking out of a movie theater in a state of bewilderment and awe at what I’d just witnessed. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The movie was Resurrection, a new-ish release by the visionary young Chinese director Bi Gan. It’s just started streaming on the Criterion Channel, and I strongly recommend you check it out.
But you’ll have to bear with me — and the film. This is a two-and-half-hour episodic art movie about dreams, consciousness, and the history of cinema. It frequently makes no sense and it’s pretentious as hell. It has elements of science fiction, horror, and fantasy weaving in and out of its very loosely related five episodes. But Resurrection’s real genre is Surreal Art Movie with Amazing Visuals and Some Plot, Maybe.
Think Tarsem Singh’s The Fall. Think David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Think Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void. Think of a less commercial Terry Gilliam or Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and then jumble them up together. Bi is both a prodigiously gifted stylist and a chameleon who slips between different filmmaking modes with apparent ease. Resurrection sure is a trip.
The set up is this: in the far future, humanity has learned that the secret to immortality is to never dream. But a few dissenters, known as Deliriants, stubbornly continue to dream, dooming themselves to death and fraying reality for everyone else. One particularly stubborn Delirant (played, in several different forms, by the actor and pop star Jackson Yee) has retreated into one of the most ancient and powerful forms of dreaming: cinema.
A hunter known as The Big Other (the elegant Shu Qi, from The Assassin) pursues the Deliriant into an opium den inside a silent movie. In this film, he takes the form of a grotesque, Nosferatu-like monster with a film projector inside his hunched back. The Big Other spools a roll of film in his internal projector and runs back his dreams as a movie; this will drain his life force and mercifully kill him, but also prolong his dream for 100 years. Conveniently, those 100 years span the 20th-century history of film, from silents, through mid-century noir, to ’90s genre crossovers. Resurrection presents four episodes from this artform-spanning, dream-diary version of the Deliriant watching his life flash before his eyes.
Resurrection’s most astounding passage is this silent-movie prologue, shot in an authentic aspect ratio and frame rate, but with a modern digital camera and in a gorgeously melancholy pastel color palette. The Big Other glides through impossible dioramas conjured by fantastically inventive art deco movie sets, trompe-l’œil effects, and practical optical illusions; giant hands reach into the frame to manipulate things within it or tear rooms away like paper. I gasped in wonder at the whole thing.
The next passage is a paranoid, fragmented horror noir, blue-tinged, and jagged in its visuals and editing. The Deliriant is hunted and tortured by a police commander seeking a MacGuffin that turns out to be a theremin in a suitcase, for some reason. More than one person stabs themselves in the ear; there are train tracks and shattered mirrors. It’s the hardest story to follow but totally visually overwhelming, a nightmarish compendium of noir aesthetics from Fritz Lang and Carol Reed through Jean-Pierre Melville to Lynch.
In the second dream, the Deliriant is a former monk looting a ruined monastery who has an existential conversation with the Buddha of Bitterness, who might also be his father. Maybe he turns into a dog at the end? Despite its heady philosophical dialogue, this one has a slightly firmer grip on its hushed and snowbound reality. It’s shot like a Czech New Wave movie from the 1960s.
Perhaps most unexpected is the defiantly un-confusing third dream, an almost social-realist crime yarn in which the Deliriant is a con man working with a young girl to claim a reward from a mob boss. The gangster is looking for a psychic for reasons secret to himself. By far the most conventionally told and straightforward piece in the movie, it’s the one that grabbed me the least; the plot makes sense and the characters are touching, but the pause in Resurrection’s otherwise relentless onrush of mad visual ideas leaves it feeling like a lull.
Finally, Bi brings us to New Year’s Eve 1999. The Deliriant is a hoodlum roaming around a port city and falling in love with a girl with dangerous connections who confesses she wants to bite him. (Perhaps you can guess where this is going.) Colliding Wong Kar-wai with Alfonso Cuarón and Park Chan-wook, this “one crazy night” yarn is a dazzling feat of moviemaking. The pair’s nightlong courtship unfolds in a single 30-minute tracking shot that winds sinuously around a whole neighborhood, through a bloody set-piece, and into and out of time-lapse, before ending on a heart-stopping boat ride into the dawn. Like the silent movie, both the practical execution and the daring poetry of this epic oner defy belief. (It’s a trifle for Bi, though, whose Long Day’s Journey into Night features an unbroken take that lasts a full 59 minutes.)
Through all these wildly different stylistic phases, Dong Jingsong’s cinematography has a stunning lucidity; Resurrection is one of the better-looking digitally shot movies I’ve ever seen. A beautiful, ethereal score by French electro act M83 also provides some much-needed tonal and emotional consistency to the wild scope of Bi’s ambition.
Bi is trying to get his arms around so much in Resurrection: the whole history of film, for one thing, at an uncertain moment for the medium. The story of the Deliriant, one of a dying breed of dreamers, suggests an elegy for the death of cinema, and each segment is haunted in its own way by a vaguely doomy sense of loss, of things ending, or of illusions losing their substance. The film’s final images are of a waxwork theater melting away to nothing. But the movie’s energy is anything but defeated, and the clue is in the title. Resurrection is a rebirth; Bi kills the movies so he can bring them back to life through the power of his own cinematic will.
Does Bi’s borderline arrogant ambition run away with the movie? Absolutely. Not all of Resurrection works, and I expect different episodes will land for different viewers. I phased out for a while in the middle of the movie, entering a kind of dream state of my own, adrift in all the stylistic changes, mysterious elisions, and portentous voiceover. But there’s no resisting the phantasmagoric power of Bi’s vision. Resurrection is a tribute to — and maybe an epitaph for — a century of film. But it’s also an electrifying vision of the art form’s future.
