Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Bi Gan
Starring: Jackson Yee, Shu Qi, Mark Chao, Li Gengxi
With his Tarkovsky-inspired 2019 masterwork Long Day's Journey Into Night, Bi Gan explored the role that memory plays in shaping our lives, and how we can fall victim to unreliable and idealised recollections. The importance of memory is a theme that continues into his latest, the highly ambitious surrealist sci-fi portmanteau film Resurrection. Gan appears to be staging a plea for film preservation, using his film's various era-aping techniques to suggest that our idea of the past is shaped by how it was captured on film.
The film plays across a century of an alternate Chinese history. We know it begins in a version of the early 20th century because Gan adopts the techniques available to filmmakers of that time, nodding to the distinctive production design of German Expressionism and Georges Méliès. The setup imagines a world where humans have discovered the secret to immortality, but it requires the absence of dreams. Some people, labelled "deliriants," continue to dream, but in doing so they rupture the concept of time. Deliriants are tracked down by "Others," who enter their minds and erase their dreams.
Resurrection is essentially an anthology film, and the bookends involve an Other played by Shu Qi who finds a deliriant played by popstar Jackson Yee. As the deliriant expires, the Other inserts a reel of film in his chest to capture his final dreams, which are presented as segments of the anthology. They all feature a protagonist played by Yee in a chameleonic performance.
The first and most confounding segment takes place during the Japanese occupation of China in the 1940s and follows an agent's search for a mysterious suitcase ala Pulp Fiction. His quest leads him to hunt down Yee in a hall of mirrors, climaxing in a simultaneous homage to The Lady from Shanghai and The Man with the Golden Gun.
The segments of Gan's film are said to correspond to the six senses of Buddhist belief, and the second story leans most explicitly into spirituality. Here Yee is a former monk who leads a gang of thieves to a run down monastery, which they subsequently loot. Staying behind he is confronted by a spirit in the form of his late father.
The most straightforward of the stories in narrative terms sees Yee play a con artist who wishes to pull a trick on a wealthy elderly man who is offering a substantial cash reward to anyone who can display supernatural powers. The con man teams up with a young street urchin, teaching the girl (Guo Mucheng) how to identify playing cards by smell. It's a charming Paper Moon-esque entry that benefits greatly from the chemistry between Yee and his cherubic co-star.
Lastly, the pièce de résistance comes in the form of one of Gan's famous unbroken single takes, this one lasting over 30 minutes. In a port city on the final night of 1999, Yee's young punk falls for a beautiful vampire under the control of a vampiric crime boss. The filmmaking is intoxicating as legendary Chinese cinematographer Dong Jingsong's camera weaves through narrow back alleys, through a cramped karaoke bar and finally onto a moving boat, all while negotiating intricate lighting setups. Gan claims it took a full two weeks to achieve the shot, and the work paid off.
If the earlier segments are unsatisfying in their narrative obtuseness, the audacity of this final segment affirms Gan's belief in the importance of cinema. At close to three hours and front-loaded with its weakest segments, Resurrection will likely test the patience of many viewers, but stick it out and you'll be rewarded by a reminder of what we stand to lose if cinema disappears in this unstable time, taking our dreams along with it.
Resurrection is in UK/ROI cinemas from March 13th.
