Bi Gan’s “Resurrection” – a cinematic journey

The logic of dreams

Bi Gan’s “Resurrection” (film review)

by Bondo Wyszpolski

There are movies, which entertain, and then there are films which engage and challenge, and Bi Gan sits high on my list in the latter category. There aren’t many current or recent directors that I’m impassioned about (Wong Kar-Wai, Bela Tarr, Paolo Sorrentino, are others), so he’s definitely in select company.

It’s been seven years since Bi Gan’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” which was notable for its last hour in which, if you were lucky enough to catch it in a movie theater, you put on your 3-D glasses and watched that final sequence, all in one luscious take. It was a masterful, cinematic ride.

Bi Gan’s previous film, his first full-length feature, was “Kali Blues,” and it too concluded with a long, one-shot finale.

The director has now returned with “Resurrection” (although the original Chinese title would be along the lines of “wild era” or “savage age”.)

It’s an ambitious work (the end credits go on and on) that embraces the (il)logic of dreams and is, in its way, as big a challenge as one of the novels by recent Nobel laureate László Krasnahorkai.

While “Resurrection” is cinematic poetry at its finest, its storyline, as such, may be hard to follow. It runs 156 minutes and is something of a reverential tour through cinematic history, one that embraces the entirety of the 20th century.

It does this by way of six chapters or vignettes, each centering on each of the senses — sight, sound, smell, touch, hearing — and mind, although this isn’t an easily digestible narrative; and in truth “Resurrection” needs an additional 156 minutes of your time in order to better grasp what you’ve just seen. That’s not likely to appeal to most moviegoers, although I’ve done that with “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and I intend to do so with Bi Gan’s latest.

Why, apparently, is it so complex? There is a character called the Phantasm who picks his way through cinematic styles and senses. Jackson Yee performs as several characters or incarnations: Monster, Qiu, Damned Dog, Man, and Apollo. But it’s all very dreamlike, and although Bi Gan references films from the past, good luck trying to figure out what they are.

Now, it’s all beautifully filmed, and often mesmerizing, but, again, the narrative handle is hard to hold onto. This leads to a less than stellar rating, perhaps an A- or B+, and I’d be surprised if the general audience rates it equally as high — despite their having the motivation to go out and watch a film of this nature.

Bi Gan has again concluded with one long, well-planned and choreographed take, the camera gliding through labyrinthine alleys, in and out of buildings with their array of characters, before making its way down to a harbor and onto one of the boats where two characters seem to navigate it away from the dock and perhaps out to sea, just as dawn breaks and the sun rises above the horizon.

Once more, all of this is quite beautiful, yet the result is like reading a novel where half of the words are in a language you don’t fully understand, so that what you’ve encountered eludes you at the same time that you’re immersed in it.

For all that, Bi Gan is in a class all his own, and I believe he is a director who has done marvelous work and will continue to do so. By all means, keep him in your sights, literally and figuratively.

Resurrection opens in theaters tomorrow, December 12. ER