Res­ur­rec­tion – first-look review

Bi Gan’s Res­ur­rec­tion opens with a title card that sets the scene for his third fea­ture: we’re in a future where the secret to eter­nal life has been dis­cov­ered. It’s sim­ple – don’t dream! Humans who give up dream­ing can live for­ev­er. But there are some hold-outs who choose to dream in secret at the risk of hav­ing short­er lives and going mad in the process. These ​‘fan­tas­mers’ are assist­ed by ​‘Big Oth­ers’ who wake the dream­ers, keep­ing them from being lost to the dream realm for­ev­er. The life of one fan­tas­mer plays out across five chap­ters in Gan’s film (co-writ­ten with Bai Xue), a sen­so­ry odyssey span­ning the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma, with more ref­er­ences than it’s pos­si­ble to com­pre­hend in a sin­gle viewing.

Since he began his film­mak­ing career in 2015 with Kalil Blues Bi Gan has been estab­lish­ing quite a rep­u­ta­tion for him­self on the glob­al film stage – in 2018, when his sec­ond fea­ture Long Day’s Jour­ney Into Night pre­miered at Cannes, the audi­ences arrived to find 3D glass­es placed upon their seats, to be used half-way through the film. It’s quite astound­ing that at just 35 years old Bi Gan is oper­at­ing at such a lev­el of ambi­tion and scale – in Res­ur­rec­tion he dou­bles down, con­dens­ing a cen­tu­ry of film his­to­ry into a 160-minute epic. It’s obvi­ous from the start that ​‘dreams’ here are rep­re­sen­ta­tive of ​‘films’ – the ​‘fan­tas­mers’ are the wily, reck­less vision­ar­ies who think them up – but Gan does help out the clue­less with a late men­tion of the ​‘for­got­ten lan­guage of cin­e­matog­ra­phy’ which feels like a cheeky side­swipe at the con­tent mill mind­set of the mod­ern film industry.

Gan traces the life of one fan­tas­mer – a mon­ster made in the image of F. W. Murnau’s Nos­fer­atu or Robert Weine’s The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari played by young heart­throb and skilled phys­i­cal per­former Jack­son Yee – across five dreams, from a wartime noir to a vam­pire night­club at the dawn of the new mil­len­ni­um, each with its own dis­tinct visu­al iden­ti­ty. The fan­tas­mer, played by Yee, takes on a dif­fer­ent iden­ti­ty each time, but there is inevitably some con­flict that plays out. He’s a want­ed mur­der­er in one dream; then a thief con­fronting the Spir­it of Bit­ter­ness; a card shark teach­ing a young girl the art of the con in anoth­er; a young punk who falls in love with a vam­pire in the stun­ning 40-minute one-take finale. (Res­ur­rec­tion oper­ates with such a del­uge of ideas and themes it’s quite baf­fling that Cannes chose to pro­gramme the film in a 10pm slot at the end of fes­ti­val when audi­ences were already jonesing for a decent’s night’s sleep.) He is looked after by his Big Oth­er, played by the seem­ing­ly age­less Mil­len­ni­um Mam­bo star Shu Qi (the cast­ing of vet­er­an Shu Qi and new­com­er Yee feels like anoth­er Bi Gan east­er egg) who devel­ops an almost mater­nal ten­der­ness towards him as the film pro­gress­es, promis­ing the fan­tas­mer a gen­tle death as he lives out his final hand­ful of dreams.

As well as the vast­ly dif­fer­ent tonal and nar­ra­tive beats Res­ur­rec­tion hits, Gan encor­po­rates dif­fer­ent styles, from the silent-era style of the film’s open­ing with its paper pup­petry and title cards dis­play­ing dia­logue through to the bold and brash neons of the final Y2K seg­ment, where he deliv­ers some sol­id cam­era wiz­ardry in a ​‘sin­gle take’ crib­bing from his own Long Day’s Jour­ney play­book. It’s a stag­ger­ing feast for the sens­es (each seg­ment revolves around one of them) but even more so a true love let­ter to cin­e­ma writ­ten bold and bril­liant. Despite its incon­sis­ten­cies – the noir sec­tion in par­tic­u­lar feels incom­plete, as though it was shaved down to meet a man­dat­ed run­time – Res­ur­rec­tion has to be seen to be believed, and Bi Gan con­tin­ues to ascend in both his imag­i­na­tive and film­mak­ing capa­bil­i­ties. It’s as thrilling to watch Res­ur­rec­tion as it is to imag­ine what the direc­tor might do next.