At the start of Bi Gan’s Resurrection, we’re given a clear set of rules for the fantasy world we’re about to enter. In the future, human lifespan has become infinite as long as you never dream, but there are some rebels – known as ‘Deliriants’ – who choose to sleep and dream anyway, living out entire mortal lives in their sleep while they are hunted through their dream by specialised agents. Right, so far, so sci-fi, and an imposing but comprehensible setup. Except, that information won’t help you understand Resurrection at all, a sometimes sublime, sometimes tedious, always baffling journey through 20th Century Chinese history (we don’t even see the future until the very end) that runs on pure emotional dream logic.
Split into five chapters, plus the future-set coda at the very end, Resurrection repeats and rhymes across each era (1900s, 1940s, 1970s, early ‘90s, 1999 and the new millennium), but the only true constant is Jackson Yee as the Deliriant. In fact, you might not even realise that you’re seeing Yee consistently, unbelievable hair and make-up work making him unrecognisable each time. A strange, Nosferatu-like monster in the 1900s, a beautiful young man stuck in noirish cycles of homoerotic violence in the ‘40s, and then various flavours of vagrant from 1970-1999, it’s a remarkable quintet of performances with barely a note repeated from era to era.
It’s in these first two segments – which are, not incidentally, the shortest ones – that Resurrection is at its best. The 1900s sequence, styled after the experimental, expressionistic films of that era, has some of the most extraordinary production design you’ll ever see, surreal sets mixing live-action and animation seamlessly in a way that gripped me immediately. Meanwhile, the violence and mystery of the ‘40s section, set just as World War 2 appears to be coming to a close, is transfixing, with kaleidoscopic visuals and a bizarre-yet-propulsive plot revolving around a theremin in a suitcase.
All this to say, Resurrection had me in its clutches after the first two chapters, a state of affairs which did not last through chapters three and four. Considerably longer and considerably less stylish, these tales (first of a dog-souled temple robber meeting the Buddhist Spirit of Bitterness and then of a wily trickster using an orphan with fake superpowers to get rich) are just too emotionally distant to compel without the formal hutzpah of their predecessors. Resurrection is a long film that manages to feel even longer; in a moment of possible self-criticism towards the end, a Deliriant hunter’s voiceover intones that, despite the fact that only two-and-a-half hours had passed, it had felt like one hundred years. Well, quite.
Bi Gan gets his mojo back at the end though with the New Year’s Eve chapter, involving gangsters and vampires and doomed young love. It’s here we see his mastery of long takes that he put to such memorable use in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the entire sequence, across around 45 minutes and covering an insane amount of ground, going off without a cut. Moving from first to third person perspective and keeping the camera still for a multi-hour timelapse to finish up the night, the commitment here is mind-boggling, and it pays off, the final run into the sunrise and onto a boat a genuinely soaring moment.
Could I explain Resurrection to anyone? No. Yes, there are running themes of the impermanence of everything and each of the five chapters is specifically focused on a certain one of the five senses, but this is not a work to be intellectualised on your first go with it (which will also likely be my only go with it, personally). It’s a strange fever dream to wash over you. If you loved Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast (I did), but wished it was half an hour longer and 20 times as opaque (I did not), then Resurrection will be your film of the year. Otherwise, it’s a visually and sonically magnificent, but also soporific, curio.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 