Holy moly, this is a lot of film. Bi Gan, the Chinese director of Long Day’s Journey into Night, already has a reputation for virtuoso display. That 2018 film (unrelated to the Eugene O’Neill play of the same name) ended with an hour-long single take in 3D. Once again, he closes out a philosophical tour de force with an epic “oner”: here, a minor hoodlum crashes about a nocturnal city with a wayward vampire before time-lapsing into spectacular dawn.
[ Long Day’s Journey into Night: This season’s pre-eminent work of event cinemaOpens in new window ]
If one felt harsh, one could view that bravura close as compensation for earlier, slower episodes, but it does more than that. The sequence imposes order on a recherche billet doux to motion pictures and primes the compliant observer for a second viewing.
The film is a panegyric in the shape of an anthological eulogy. Cinematic styles alter as we move from magic lantern through espionage noir to the hand-held trickery of that closing flourish. The film will not be for everyone, but nobody could sensibly claim that Resurrection offers a commonplace experience.
We are roughly in the area of science fiction. In a near-future, the world’s population has stopped dreaming – by way of extending lifespan, it seems – and, as a consequence, films have taken on symbolic and nostalgic value.
READ MORE
A dissenter from the norm known as a “Deliriant” (Jackson Yee) conceals himself within movies to continue the process of dreaming. This takes us back to an analogy that critics have employed since the birth of the medium. Film and dream: both experienced in the dark, both dragging us through narratives we cannot control, both offering oblique variations on everyday waking life.
In truth, it would be a waste of effort to overexplain the internal logic of Resurrection (if any such elucidation were even possible). It is a dream about dreams, slipping from one apparently irrational emotion to the next.
Employing the metaphor of an unlit wax candle for the current spiritless eternity, the film links together its episodes through the notion of pursuit. We learn of the Deliriant’s journey to his current place through discrete narratives, in each of which he manifests as a different character. Shu Qi, the glamorous star of several Hou Hsiao-Hsien films, plays the “Big Other” who hunts him through these adventures.
In the first dream (or movie) the Deliriant is Qiu, assistant to a musician in a ruined city. JS Bach’s Come Sweet Death becomes a significant refrain in that sequence. In the second, perhaps the most taxing chapter he plays a former monk in an abandoned temple. In the third, he is a con man trying to solve a riddle as he perfects a scam in which an assistant claims to identify any card by its smell. Finally, on the millennial New Year’s Eve, our anti-hero happens upon the coolest of bloodsuckers (Li Gengxi) in the most dangerous of locations.
That 40-minute take somehow engineers gunfights and punch-ups on the way to a beautiful valediction to the century, to dreams, to the movies. Maybe 2000 is a little too early for that last goodbye, but some vital organ within the body cinema was already failing.
“Think back to when we watched those great films,” Bi Gan said recently. “How often did we truly read and fully understand everything right there in the moment, during those two hours?” He went on to bemoan our current anxiety about artworks not immediately revealing their secrets.
Resurrection, shot with extravagant beauty by Dong Jingsong, makes more sense on first viewing than the director perhaps allows. Each story is whole in itself. But it has the quality of a gorgeous knot that will never fully be untied.
In cinemas from Friday, March 13th
