Resurrection

Providing a story synopsis to a film by the Chinese wunderkind Bi Gan rarely does audiences any favours, but here goes. In Resurrection, his third film and first for seven years, we are dropped into a reality where the human race has exchanged the ability to dream for extended lives, apart from a few ‘deliriants’ who continue to dream in secret. We follow one of these monstrous deliriants (Jackson Yee) who, in his dying moments, experiences a series of cinematic dreams. I’m well aware this sounds a bit like the sort of 80s rock opera where it turns out Neil Peart is Jesus, but in practice it works as a portmanteau of distinct short films in which the deliriant becomes a series of characters – be they monks, con-men or lovelorn delinquents – all played by Yee, in different situations through time.

No one could accuse Bi of not taking big swings, and Resurrection is full of the kind of bold decisions that other filmmakers wouldn’t dream of. For example, the monk-centric third chapter seems to be deliberately boring the audience, slowing the pace to a crawl, complete with loud snoring on the soundtrack, as if Bi is beckoning the audience to push through and slip into the kind of dream state in which this film would be best enjoyed.

This isn't new territory for Bi. In his previous film, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, he attempted to formally mirror the drifting fog of memory and succeeded so well that audiences found it to be either totally inscrutable or achingly heartbreaking. He achieves something similar here. The stories spin off each other in beautifully enigmatic fashion until it becomes apparent that to get bogged down in concrete symbolism is to miss the point. That is not to say Resurrection isn’t thematically rich: there is a great deal in the film on China’s shift throughout the 20th century, for example. But it's as a sensory cinematic experience that makes the film utterly remarkable.

The phrase ‘love letter to cinema’ gets bandied around a lot, and it does apply here, but Resurrection is not Spielberg’s misty-eyed nostalgia or Tarantino interfering with himself in a video shop. Instead, Gan’s vision is of the boundless possibilities of the medium. To this end, he trades in the weightless drift of Long Day’s Journey into Night and instead takes us on a whistle-stop trip through film form, flying through silent cinema, film noir and the neon-hued East Asian cinema of the turn of the millennium. It’s a dazzling display of technical prowess, but the film skilfully avoids pastiche, largely because Gan is so singular a crafter of sublime imagery that it never feels for a second like the film could be made by anyone else.

Resurrection is not without precedent. Holy Motors and The Beast hang heavy in its wonky relationship with sci-fi and fragmented narratives, but the film's closest precedent is Joyce’s Ulysses. An excitable Supermarket Sweep of form and style, made by someone who can’t shake their awe at the sheer potential of their medium, and indeed of being alive, the whole film feels like a resounding echo of Molly Bloom’s final "Yes."

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Released 13 March by Trinity; certificate 15