After the impossible feat of Long Days Journey into Night, his sophomore film partly shot in 3D, Bi Gan, the wunderkind of Chinese cinema, comes up with a sumptuous epic that tells the history of cinema's past, present and future spanning the whole 20th century in Resurrection. In a lumbering 2 hr 40 min runtime, the film is divided into 5 chapters with different actors playing the same character, Fantasmer/dreamer. You see, in the future, people live forever because they don't dream. Fantasmers, because of their ability to dream, they burn bright but they don't last long. Perhaps a century.
Bi, with Kaili Blue and Long Days, cultivated cinema as a waking dream with languorous filmic language with implausibly long takes and dreamlike atmosphere. Resurrection, its ironic title notwithstanding, is an elegy to the cinema and its history. It starts out with the title cards, mimicking old silent movies of the turn of the century. With production design right out of German Expressionism, with Big Other, a maternal figure, played by Shu Qi (of numerous Hou Hsiao Hsien films), wakes Fantasmer (first played by Jackson Yee), an ogre like monster, from his slumber, to guide him through the century and send him off to his death at the end.
These dreams/stories moves from a mysterious murderer in a war time noir, then a smuggler meeting a spirit of bitterness in an abandoned old Buddhist temple, a con artist teaching a young girl card tricks for a big score, and a young punk falling in love with a vampire on the eve of the new century. Each elaborate chapter, dedicated to different senses, is shot in differing formats and styles, showcasing Bi's command of the artform.
And again, the 40-minute uncut last section of the film, spanning night to dawn, is a jaw-dropping cinematic feat that really needs to be seen to be believed. Taking place in and out of squalid urban slum by the water, camera follows two would be young lovers as they enter various rooms, industrial landscapes, seedy shops, and a nightclub filled with people, all captured in fluid motion of the camera gimbal in one take (shot by DP Dong Jingsong of Wild Goose Lake, Long Days Journey into Night). To make things even more incredible, POV changes in mid take to an all powerful mob boss who sings in a karaoke bar, who ends up stabbing our protagonist multiple times.
References are everywhere from Murnau to Wong Kar-wai to Jean Vigo and I'm sure there's a lot I didn't catch in my first viewing. But Resurrection is a staggering work of an artist with means (backed by CG Cinema and Arte France) to go big or go broke. While the premise being thin, Resurrection is a towering artistic achievement above the sea of mediocre offerings in the state of world cinema right now.
