Despite a framing device that vaguely ties its disparate stories together, there’s an extent to which Bi Gan’s Resurrection is essentially a glorified anthology film. But oh, how glorious its sights and sounds truly are. The writer/director’s follow-up to 2018’s 3D spectacular Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a further large-scale expansion of the preoccupation that emerged from his 2015 debut feature, Kaili Blues – that of blurring the boundaries between dreams, memory and ostensible “reality” via the language of film.
Interwoven with a rumination on a rapidly evolving China, Resurrection also reflects on the first century of cinema, linking the medium and dreams through the logic of their fragmented storytelling. A spellbinding opening chapter places us in a society where humans have ceased to dream, in exchange for eternal life. Those who persist with dreaming supposedly threaten time’s stability. Labelled Deliriants, they’re hunted by people called Big Others, who can see through their dreamed illusions.
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One such agent (Shu Qi) pursues a Deliriant (Jackson Yee) who’s hiding in an apparently “ancient, forgotten past” known as film. Their first encounter occurs in a silent cinema wonderland that blends German expressionism, early Chinese film and Lon Chaney-like monster movies to stunning effect. The sympathetic Big Other allows the Deliriant to dream one final time as he dies, a magical projector replaying his life of different identities.
The dreamt stories include a widescreen wartime noir in a bombed-out city, shot in icy blues; a snowy temple tale where a thief converses with a spirit; and a tragic riff on a Paper Moon-esque caper, in which a con artist teams up with an orphan to trick a rich man who’s searching for a genuine psychic. While the segments are connected through a different human sense each time, they vary considerably in their pacing, performance styles, approach to sound (M83 are on scoring duty) and general aesthetic. An elegiac tone unites them all, though space is made for the odd piss or fart gag for levity.
Yee recurs as the protagonist of each segment, with Qi returning for the epilogue and occasional narration. The single-chapter supporting player given the most material to work with is the magnetic Li Gengxi in the transcendent final dream, set in a port town on New Year’s Eve, 1999. She’s an enigmatic girl falling for Yee’s hoodlum as the world might end, in a blood red-hued, horror-tinged version of Before Sunrise, captured by Bi and the cinematographer Jingsong Dong through an extended, hallucinatory take that frequently changes perspective. This take is a bit shorter (35-ish minutes) than Long Day’s famed hour-long 3D shot, but no less effective in how it collapses time and space in service of rich emotion. Unlike with more gimmicky long takes (eg in Sam Mendes’ 1917) that emphasise technical wizardry over meaningful purpose, Bi’s signature move proves an essential tool for playing with the temporal possibilities of cinematic storytelling. With such a moving ode to the symbiotic relationship between dreams and film, a nightmare would be if this is his final word on the matter.