Across the three feature films he’s made to date, the 36-year-old Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan has proven himself prodigiously gifted at manipulating the parameters of time and space through moving images, resulting in visually astonishing, narratively diffuse feats of showmanship that drift and shift in accordance with a self-consciously slippery dream logic.
In his 2015 debut, “Kaili Blues,” which maps the contours of the area around his hometown, Kaili City, in southwestern Guizhou province, Bi traced the psychic and physical geography of his own youth to reflect on rural China’s relationship to the country’s rapidly advancing modernity. Wandering the streets and alleys of a riverside village in a bravura long take that collapsed its past, present, and future in a swirl, he announced himself as a boldly cinematic voice, one for whom restless yearning to escape from existentially impoverished realities into fantastic, subconscious realms was clearly a formal and thematic imperative.
His elliptical debut turned out to be mere table-setting for “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a labyrinthine neo-noir that—despite unfurling across Guizhou province—was a more baroque, impersonal affair. Following another drifter in search of a missing person, Bi reinterpreted this generic premise as a jumping-off point to meditate at large on time, memory, and cinema’s role in shaping both, enumerating his influences—among them Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai, and Andrei Tarkovsky, the latter of whom Bi has openly referred to as a formative inspiration—while burnishing his international reputation as a filmmaker capable of traversing stylistic boundaries with supreme confidence. Again came a fluid long take, this time in the form of an hour-long 3D sequence shot that started once its protagonist took his seat at a run-down movie house.
This sophomore effort—technically a leap forward, one achieved with a surfeit of production resources—brought Bi toward other issues, none unfamiliar for an emerging auteur with his emphases. Most glaringly, for all the puzzling surface pleasures wrought by its heightened stylization and oblique storyline, the film felt consciously artificial, all but completely lacking its predecessor’s tactility. If “Kaili Blues” laid the groundwork for Bi’s cineastic language, it also grounded him in a localized context where his abstractions could still accrue atmospheric density. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” might be seen as unburdened by its aversion to narrative or emotional clarity, but its flourishes felt curiously weightless and inconsequential.
“Resurrection,” Bi’s third feature, is no less staggering than his last two, and it’s saturated with some of the more striking images you’re likely to see in a theater this year. Still, its onerously oneiric progression is a disappointing development, signaling a greater shift from the yearning poetics of Bi’s past work toward circular meta-cinematic pastiche. If his previous films were concerned with exploring time and memory, the subject of dreaming is what most moves Bi in “Resurrection” — but in all three instances, his thesis is essentially the same self-reflexive assertion of belief in cinema’s power to reflect the experience of our inner journeys.
Styled as a love letter to the grand illusion of cinema, albeit one to be read upon its deathbed, “Resurrection” opens in a fitfully imagined alternate reality where imagination itself has become imperiled. People have discovered that the secret to immortality lies in no longer dreaming. However, a small subset of the population has defied this anti-dreaming decree, preferring to still revel in fantasies despite the fact that this significantly shortens their lifespans. (A series of intertitles, styled to emulate those of the silent-film era, compares people not dreaming to “candles that do not burn,” and Bi consistently returns to this metaphor across each of the film’s chapters.)
Dream dissidents, known as “Deliriants,” are summarily outcast from society and hunted down by “Other Ones,” who are capable of entering their dreams and do so to extinguish them, lest these outliers become monstrous. “Resurrection” follows one Deliriant, played by Chinese pop star and actor Jackson Yee, as he shapeshifts from dream to dream at the behest of an Other One (Shu Qi), who installs a film projector inside him as a seeming act of mercy, allowing him a few reveries more before his inevitable death. Comprising the rest of the film, each of the Deliriant’s dream scenarios is linked to a different era of moviemaking, from German expressionism to neon-streaked, Wong Kar-wai-indebted romanticism; Bi also connects each vignette to one of the five senses and places them in distinct periods of 20th-century Chinese history.
The most spellbinding section comes first, through Bi’s tribute to silent melodrama, as the Other One hunts Yee’s Deliriant through what appears to be a Chinese opium den but soon transforms into a byzantine maze of exaggerated, crooked film-set backdrops. Evoking memories of both Murnau and Méliès, the accomplished production design of “Resurrection”—by Liu Qiang and Tu Nan—shines brightest here. Through its successive sections, the film then morphs into a war-time espionage thriller, adrift in smoke and mirrors; a folktale set in the ruins of a Buddhist temple, involving a thief and a trickster god; a tragicomic riff on “Paper Moon,” about a con artist and his orphan apprentice who allege they can identify playing cards by smell; and, finally, a woozy romance between two young lovers—one seemingly a vampire—on the eve of the new millennium, this last part playing out as another of Bi’s virtuosic long takes.
The ambition, as we’ve come to expect from him, is overpowering. “Resurrection” is alternately a sci-fi picture, a monster movie, a film noir, a cryptic parable, a crime caper, and a gangland romance — and it’s sometimes all of the above, blurring tones and textures to suggest a certain metamorphic potential within each of the stories as the Deliriant experiences them. Yet there’s a curiously draining quality to Bi’s film as well, one that feels related less to its sprawling scope than to the repetitive, riddling nature of the segments therein. As a procession of characters is transmogrified in strange ways, or otherwise meet surprising ends, across a series of abstruse set pieces that function primarily to pay homage to various techniques, Bi’s dominant mood is one of plaintive desolation, and this wears thin as quickly as all the willfully ersatz dialogue he invites audiences to puzzle over.
Bi’s reverence for the century of cinema he references throughout “Resurrection” is indisputable, and the sheer opulence on display will leave some enraptured. Certainly, in terms of production design and cinematography, he’s assembled an intimidating contraption made up of far too many moving parts to track upon initial viewing. But the effect of this outsized ambition is often mannered, even mechanistic.
For all its waxing lyrical about the need for humanity to keep dreaming through cinema, all its technically polished tributes to film history, its showmanship lacks emotional substance. If imitation is the sincerest act of flattery, here it also proves flattening; as in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Bi enshrines his influences through recurrent motifs and symbols, through one assured demonstration of a recognizable style after another, but in doing so he also entombs them, creating a film that feels like less a work of imaginative possibility from an ascendant master than an act of preservation by a dutiful curator.
Paradoxically, for a film about the undying essence of the movies, what’s missing is any more molten, organic sense of processing that would evoke the true surreality of dream states. In place of an artist’s passion, Bi’s cold touch carries an undertaker’s sense of ceremony. Without a deeper subconscious drive behind his construction, it also lacks the intense aura of mystery and desire one would welcome in a grand monument like this. Instead, Bi has erected a series of simulacra, a hall of mirrors that reflect one another endlessly yet also indifferently; its images only seem to grow smaller and smaller as they recede into infinite distance. “Resurrection” is ravishing in its command of shadow and light, but it studiously hollows out any sense of soul beneath the surface.
“Resurrection” is now in theaters, via Janus Films.
